VOYAGE TO THE MOON
The moon was full, the sky clear, and the clocks had just struck nine as I was returning with four of my friends from a house near Paris.[19] Our wit must have been sharpened on the cobbles of the road for it thrust home whichever way we turned it; distant as the moon was she could not escape it. The various thoughts provoked in us by the sight of that globe of saffron diverted us on the road and our eyes were filled by this great luminary. Now one of us likened her to a window in Heaven through which the glory of the blessed might be faintly seen; then another, inspired by ancient fables, imagined that Bacchus kept a tavern in Heaven and had hung out the Full Moon for his sign; then another vowed that it was the block where Diana set Apollo's ruffs; another exclaimed that it might well be the Sun himself who, having put off his rays at night, was watching through a hole what the world did when he was not there. For my part, said I, I am desirous to add my fancies to yours and without amusing myself with the witty notions you use to tickle time to make it run the faster, I think that the Moon is a world like this and that our world is their Moon. The company gratified me with a great shout of mirth.
"Perhaps in the same way", said I, "at this moment in the Moon they jest at some one who there maintains that this globe is a world."
But though I showed them that Pythagoras, Epicurus, Democritus and, in our own age, Copernicus and Kepler had been of this opinion, I did but cause them to strain their throats the more heartily.
This thought, whose boldness jumped with my humour, was strengthened by contradiction and sank so deep in me that all the rest of the way I was pregnant with a thousand definitions of the Moon of which I could not be delivered. By supporting this fantastic belief with serious reasoning I grew well-nigh persuaded of it. But hearken, reader, the miracle or accident used by Providence or Fortune to convince me of it:
I returned home and scarcely had I entered my room to rest after the journey when I found on my table an open book which I had not put there. I recognised it as mine, which made me ask my servant why he had taken it out of the book-case. I asked him but perfunctorily, for he was a fat Lorrainer, whose soul admitted of no exercises more noble than those of an oyster. He swore to me that either the Devil or I had put it there. For my own part I was sure I had not handled it for more than a year.
I glanced at it again; it was the works of Cardan[20]; and though I had no idea of reading it I fell, as if directed to it, precisely upon a story told by this philosopher. He says that, reading one evening by candle-light, he perceived two tall old men enter through the closed door of his room and after he had asked them many questions they told him they were inhabitants of the Moon; which said, they disappeared. I remained so amazed to see a book brought there by itself as well as at the time and the leaf at which I found it open that I took this whole train of events to be an inspiration of God urging me to make known to men that the Moon is a world.
"What!" quoth I to myself, "after I have talked of a matter this very day, a book, which is perhaps the only one in a world that treats of this subject, flies down from the shelf on to my table, becomes capable of reason to the extent of opening at the very page of so marvellous an adventure and thereby supplies meditations to my fancy and an object to my resolution. Doubtless", I continued, "the two old men who appeared to that great man are the same who have moved my book and opened it at this page to spare themselves the trouble of making me the harangue they made Cardan. But", I added, "how can I clear up this doubt if I do not go there? And why not?" I answered myself at once, "Prometheus of old went to Heaven to steal fire!"
These feverish outbursts were followed by the hope of making successfully such a voyage.
I shut myself up to achieve my purpose in a rather lonely country-house where, after I had flattered my fancy with several methods which might have borne me up there, I committed myself to the heavens in this manner:
I fastened all about me a number of little bottles filled with dew, and the heat of the Sun drawing them up carried me so high that at last I found myself above the loftiest clouds. But, since this attraction caused me to rise too rapidly and instead of my drawing nearer the Moon, as I desired, she seemed to me further off than when I started, I broke several of my bottles until I felt that my weight overbore the attraction and that I was falling towards the earth. My opinion was not wrong; for I reached ground sometime later when, calculating from the hour at which I had started, it ought to have been midnight. Yet I perceived that the Sun was then at the highest point above the horizon and that it was midday. I leave you to conjecture my surprise; indeed it was so great that not knowing how to explain this miracle I had the insolence to fancy that in compliment to my boldness God had a second time fixed the Sun in Heaven to light so glorious an enterprise. My astonishment increased when I found I did not recognise the country I was in, for it appeared to me that, having risen straight up, I ought to have landed in the place from which I had started. Encumbered as I was I approached a hut where I perceived some smoke and I was barely a pistol-shot from it when I found myself surrounded by a large number of savages. They appeared mightily surprised at meeting me; for I was the first, I think, they had ever seen dressed in bottles. And, to overthrow still more any explanation they might have given of this equipment, they saw that as I walked I scarcely touched the ground. They did not know that at the least movement I gave my body the heat of the midday sun-beams lifted me up with my dew; and if my bottles had been more numerous I should very likely have been carried into the air before their eyes. I tried to converse with them; but, as if terror had changed them into birds, in a twinkling they were lost to sight in the neighbouring woods. Nevertheless I caught one whose legs without doubt betrayed his intention. I asked him with much difficulty (for I was out of breath) how far it was from there to Paris, since when people went naked in France and why they fled from me in such terror. This man to whom I spoke was an old man, yellow as an olive, who cast himself at my knees, joined his hands above his head, opened his mouth and shut his eyes. He muttered for some time but as I could not perceive that he said anything I took his language for the hoarse babble of a dumb man.
Cyrano's first attempt.
Sometime afterwards I saw coming towards me a band of soldiers with drums beating and I noticed that two left the main body to reconnoitre me. When they were near enough to hear I asked them where I was.
"You are in France", replied they, "but who the Devil put you in this condition? How does it happen that we do not know you? Has the fleet arrived? Are you going to warn the Governor of it? Why have you divided your brandy into so many bottles?"
To all this I replied that the Devil had not put me in that condition; that they did not know me because they could not know all men; that I did not know there were ships on the Seine; that I had no information to give Monsieur de Montbazon[21] and that I was not carrying any brandy.
"Oh! Ho!" said they taking me by the arm, "you are pleased to be merry! The Governor will understand you!"
They carried me towards their main body as they spoke these words and I learned from them that I was indeed in France, but not in Europe, for I was in New France.
I was brought before the Viceroy, Monsieur de Montmagnie. He asked me my country, my name and my rank, and when I had satisfied him by relating the happy success of my voyage, whether he believed it or only feigned to believe it, he had the kindness to allot me a room in his house. I was happy to fall in with a man capable of lofty ideas, who was not scandalised when I said that the earth must have turned while I was above it, seeing that I had begun to rise two leagues from Paris and had fallen by an almost perpendicular line in Canada.
That evening just as I was going to bed he came into my room.
"I should not have interrupted your rest", said he, "had I not believed that a man who travels nine hundred leagues in half a day can easily do so without being weary. But you do not know", added he, "the merry dispute I have just had on your behalf with our Jesuit Fathers?[22] They are convinced that you are a magician and the greatest mercy you can obtain from them is to pass for no more than an impostor. And, after all, this movement you assign to the Earth is surely some neat paradox? The reason I am not of your opinion is that although you may have left Paris yesterday you could still have reached this country to-day without the Earth having turned. For the Sun, which bore you up by means of your bottles, must have drawn you hither since, according to Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe,[23] and modern philosophers it moves in a direction opposite to that in which you say the Earth moves. And then what probability have you for asserting that the Sun is motionless when we see it move, and that the Earth turns about its centre with such rapidity when we feel it firm beneath us?"
"Sir", replied I, "here are the reasons which oblige us to suppose so: First it is a matter of common sense to think that the Sun is placed in the centre of the Universe, since all bodies in Nature need this radical fire, which dwells in the heart of the Kingdom to be in a position to satisfy their necessities promptly; and that the cause of procreation should be placed in the midst of all bodies to act equally upon them: In the same way wise Nature placed the genitals in the centre of man, pips in the centre of apples, kernels in the centre of their fruit; and in the same way the onion shelters within a hundred surrounding skins the precious germ whence ten million others must draw their essence. The apple is a little universe by itself whose core, which is warmer than the other parts, is a Sun spreading about it the preserving heat of its globe; and the germ in the onion is the little Sun of that little world which heats and nourishes the vegetable salt of the mass. Granted this, I say that since the Earth needs the light, the heat and the influence of this great fire, she turns about it to receive equally in every part this strength which conserves her. For it would be as ridiculous to hold that this great luminous body turns about a point of no importance to it as to imagine when we see a roasted lark that it has been cooked by turning the hearth about it.[24] Otherwise, if the Sun were made to perform this labour it would seem that the doctor needs the patient, that the strong must yield to the weak, the great serve the small, and that instead of a ship coasting the shores of a country we must make the country move around the vessel. And if you find it hard to believe that so heavy a mass can move, tell me, I pray you, are the stars and the Heavens that you make so solid any lighter? And it is easy for us who are convinced of the roundness of the earth to deduce its movements from its shape; but why suppose the sky to be round since you cannot know it and since if, of all possible shapes it has not this shape, it certainly cannot move? I do not reproach you with your eccentrics, your concentrics and your epicycles,[25] all of which you can only explain very confusedly and from which my system is free. Let us speak only of the natural causes of this movement. On your side you are compelled to invoke the aid of intelligences to move and direct your globes! But without disturbing the tranquillity of the Sovereign Being, who doubtless created Nature quite perfect and whose wisdom completed it in such a way that by fitting it for one thing He has not rendered it unfit for another—I, on my part, find in the Earth herself the power which makes it move. I declare then that the sun-beams, together with the Sun's influence, striking upon the Earth in their motion, make it turn as we turn a globe by striking it with the hand, or that the vapours which continually evaporate from the Earth's bosom on that side where the Sun shines, are repulsed by the cold of the middle regions, rush back on the Earth and, of necessity being only able to strike it obliquely, make it dance in this fashion.
"The explanation of the two other movements is still less intricate. Consider I beg of you...."
At these words the Viceroy interrupted me.
"I prefer", he said, "to excuse you from that trouble (I have myself read several books of Gassendi on the subject) provided that you will listen to what I heard one day from one of our Fathers who shared your opinion. 'Truly', said he, 'I imagine that the Earth turns, not for the reasons alleged by Copernicus but because the fire of Hell (as we learn from Holy Scripture) being enclosed in the centre of the Earth, the damned souls, flying from the heat of the fire to avoid it, clamber upwards and thus make the Earth turn, as a dog makes a wheel turn when he runs round inside it.'"
We praised the good Father's zeal and, having finished the panegyric, the Viceroy said he greatly wondered the system of Ptolemy should be so generally received, considering how little probable it is.
"Sir", I replied, "most men judge only by their senses, are convinced only by their eyes; and just as a man in a ship sailing by the coast thinks himself stationary and the shore moving, so men, turning with the Earth around the sky, believe that the sky itself turns around them. Add to this the intolerable pride of human beings, who are convinced that Nature was made for them alone—as if it were probable that the Sun, a vast body four hundred and thirty-four times greater than the Earth,[26] should have been lighted only to ripen its medlars and to head its cabbages. For my part, far from yielding to their impertinence, I believe that the planets are worlds around the Sun and that the fixed stars are suns too with planets around them, that is to say, worlds, which we cannot see from here because they are too small and because their borrowed light cannot reach us. For, in good faith, how can we suppose that globes so spacious are only huge desert countries and that ours, because we grovel on it before a dozen proud-stomached rogues, should have been made to command them all? What! Because the Sun measures our days and our years, does that mean it was created only to save us from breaking our heads against the wall? No! If this visible God lightens man it is accidental, as the King's torch accidentally lightens a porter passing in the street."
"But", said he, "if, as you assert, the fixed stars are so many suns we may deduce thence that the universe is infinite since it is probable that the people in the worlds about a fixed star, which you take to be a sun, perceive above them other fixed stars which we cannot see from here and that it continues in this manner to infinity."[27]
"Doubt it not", replied I, "as God was able to make the soul immortal so could He make the World infinite, if it be true that Eternity is nothing else than duration without bounds and the infinite, space without limit. And then God Himself would be finite if we believe the world not to be infinite, since He could not be where there is nothing and since He could not increase the size of the World without adding something to His own extent, by beginning to be where He had not been formerly. We must believe then that as we see Saturn and Jupiter from here we should perceive, if we were in one or the other, many worlds we do not perceive from here and that the universe is constructed in this manner to infinity."
"Faith!" replied he, "you may well talk but I cannot comprehend infinity."
"Why, tell me," said I, "do you understand better the nothing which is beyond it? Not at all. When you think of this nothing you imagine at least something like wind, something like air, and that is something; but if you do not comprehend infinity as a general idea you may conceive it at least in parts, for it is not difficult to imagine beyond the earth, air and fire that we see, more air and more earth. Infinity is simply a texture without bounds. If you ask me how these worlds were made, seeing that Holy Scripture speaks only of one created by God, I reply that it speaks only of ours because this is the only world God took the trouble to make with His own hand and all the others, whether we see them or do not see them, hanging in the azure of the universe, are dross thrown off by the suns.[28] For how could these great fires continue if they were not united with matter to feed them? Well, just as fire casts off the ashes which choke it, just as gold in the crucible severs itself from the marcasite which lessens its purity, and just as our heart frees itself by vomiting from the indigestible humours which attack it; so the suns disgorge every day and purge themselves of the remnants of that matter which feeds their fire. But when these suns have altogether used up the matter which maintains them, you cannot doubt but that they will spread out on all sides to seek new fuel and will fall upon all the worlds they had thrown off before and particularly upon the nearest ones: Then these great fires again burning up all these bodies will again throw them off pell-mell on all sides as before, and being purified little by little they will begin to act as suns to these little worlds which they engender by casting them out of their spheres; doubtless it was this which made the disciples of Pythagoras predict an universal conflagration. This is not a ridiculous fancy; New France, where we are, produces a very convincing proof. This vast continent of America is one half of the Earth, and though our predecessors had sailed the ocean a thousand times they never discovered it. At that time it did not exist, any more than many islands, peninsulas and mountains which rise on our globe, until the rusts of the Sun being cleaned off and cast far away were condensed into balls heavy enough to be attracted towards the centre of our world, either little by little in small parts or perhaps suddenly in one mass. And this is not so unreasonable but that Saint Augustine would have applauded it had this country been discovered in his time, for this great personage whose genius was enlightened by the Holy Ghost asserts that in his time the Earth was as flat as an oven and that it swam upon the water like half of a cut orange; but if ever I have the honour to see you in France I will prove to you, by means of a very excellent perspective glass I have, that certain obscurities which from here seem to be spots are worlds in process of formation."
My eyes were closing as I said this, which obliged the Viceroy to bid me good-night. The next and following days we had conversations of the like nature; but since some time afterwards the press of business in the Province interrupted our philosophizing I fell back the more eagerly on my plan of reaching the Moon.
As soon as the Moon rose I went off among the woods meditating on the contrivance and issue of my undertaking. At length on Saint John's Eve when those in the fort were debating whether or no they would aid the savages of the country against the Iroquois, I went off by myself behind our house to the summit of a little hill, where I acted as follows.
With a machine I had constructed, which I thought would lift me as much as I wanted, I cast myself into the air from the top of a rock; but because I had taken my measures badly I was tumbled roughly into the valley. Injured as I was I returned to my room without being discouraged. I took beef-marrow and greased all my body with it, for I was bruised from head to foot; and after I had comforted my heart with a bottle of cordial I returned to look for my machine, which I did not find, seeing that certain soldiers who had been sent into the forest to cut wood for the purpose of building a Saint John's fire to be lighted that evening, had come upon it by chance and carried it to the fort. After several hypotheses of what it might be they discovered the device of the spring,[29] when some said they ought to bind around it a number of rockets because their rapid ascent would lift it high in the air, the spring would move its great wings and everyone would take the machine for a fire-dragon.
I sought it for a long time and at last I found it in the middle of the market-place of Quebec just as they were lighting it. The pain of seeing the work of my hands in such peril affected me so much that I rushed forward to grasp the arm of the soldier who was about to fire it. I seized his slow-match and cast myself furiously into the machine to break off the fire-works which surrounded it; but I came too late, for I had scarcely set my two feet in it when I was carried off into the clouds. The fearful horror that dismayed me did not so thoroughly overwhelm the faculties of my soul but that I could recollect afterwards all that happened to me at this moment. You must know then that the flame had no sooner consumed one line of rockets (for they had placed them in sixes by means of a fuse which ran along each half-dozen), when another set caught fire and then another, so that the blazing powder delayed my peril by increasing it. The rockets at length ceased through the exhaustion of material and, while I was thinking I should leave my head on the summit of a mountain, I felt (without my having stirred) my elevation continue; and my machine, taking leave of me, fell towards the Earth. This extraordinary adventure filled me with a joy so uncommon that in my delight at finding myself delivered from certain danger I was impudent enough to philosophize about it. I sought with my eyes and intelligence the reason for this miracle and I perceived that my flesh was still swollen and greasy with the marrow I had rubbed on it for the bruises caused by my fall. I knew that at the time the Moon was waning and that during this quarter she is wont to suck up the marrow of animals; she drank the marrow I had rubbed on myself with the more eagerness in that her globe was nearer me and that her strength was not weakened by any intervening clouds.[30]
When I had traversed, according to the calculation I have since made, more than three-quarters the distance which separates the Earth from the Moon, I suddenly turned a somersault without my having stumbled at all; in fact I should not have perceived it had I not felt my head burdened with the weight of my body. I realised then that I was not falling towards our world, for although I was between two Moons and could see very well that I drew further from the one as I approached the other, I was certain that the larger was our Earth since after a day or two of travelling the distant reflection of the Sun confounded the diversity of bodies and climates and therefore it appeared to me like a large gold platter, similar to the other. From this I supposed I was descending upon the Moon and I was confirmed in this opinion when I remembered that I had only begun to fall when I had passed three-quarters of the distance. For, said I to myself, the Moon's mass being less than ours the sphere of its activity must be less extended and consequently I felt the attraction of its centre more tardily.
After I had been long falling, as I supposed, for the violence of my fall prevented me from observing it, I remember no more than that I found myself under a tree, entangled with three or four rather large branches which I had snapped off in my fall and my face moistened with an apple which had been crushed against it.[31]
As you shall know very soon, this place was happily the Earthly Paradise and the tree I fell on precisely the Tree of Life. You may well suppose that without this miraculous chance I should have been dead a thousand times. I have often reflected since on the vulgar notion that a man who throws himself from a great height is suffocated before he reaches the ground; but from my adventure I conclude this to be false, or else this fruit's powerful juice trickling into my mouth must have recalled my soul which was yet near my warm corpse and ready to perform the functions of life. In fact as soon as I was on the ground my pain departed before it had even limned itself in my memory and I had but a slight recollection of having lost the hunger that had so tormented me during my voyage.
I got up and I had scarcely noticed the banks of the largest of the four great rivers, which there form a lake, when the spirit or invisible soul of the herbs which breathe out over that land delighted my nostrils. The little stones were neither hard nor rough except to the sight; they were soft when walked on.
I came first of all to a place where five avenues met and the oaks which formed them were so extremely tall that they appeared to support in the heavens a high garden-plot of greenery. Glancing from the root to the top and then from the summit to the foot I wondered whether the Earth bore them up or whether they themselves did not rather carry the Earth hanging from their roots. It seemed as if their heads, so proudly lifted, were bowed by force under the burden of the celestial globes and that they groaned as they supported this weight; their arms extended towards the sky seemed to embrace it and to ask from the stars the pure benignity of their influences which they receive before they lose any of their innocence in the bed of the elements. There, on all sides the flowers with no gardener but Nature exhale a wild breath which awakens and satisfies the sense of smell; there, the incarnate of a rose on the eglantine and the bright blue of a violet under the brambles leave no liberty of choice and make you think that each is more beautiful than the other; there, every season is spring; there, no poisonous plant grows but that its existence betrays its safety; there, the rivulets relate their journeys to the pebbles; there, a thousand little feathered voices make the forest ring with the sound of their songs and the flattering assembly of these melodious throats is so general that every leaf in the wood seems to have taken the tongue and form of a nightingale; Echo delights so much in their songs that to hear her repeat them one would think she wished to learn them by heart. Beside this wood two meadows are to be seen whose continuous happy green formed one emerald to the horizon. The confused mixture of colours which the Spring attaches to a hundred little flowers mingles the tints together and these waving flowers seem running to escape the caresses of the wind. This meadow looks like an ocean but, since it is a sea without shore, my eye, terrified at having wandered so far without discovering a limit, quickly sent my thought over it; and my thought wondering if it were not the end of the world would have convinced itself that so charming a scene had perhaps compelled Heaven to join itself to Earth. In the midst of this vast perfect carpet flow the silver bubbles of a rustic fountain whose banks are crowned with turf enamelled with daisies, buttercups and violets, and the crowding of these flowers all about appears as if each were thrusting forward to be the first reflected. The stream is still in its cradle, it is but just born and its young smooth face shows not one wrinkle; the large curves it makes, returning upon itself a thousand times, show how regretfully it leaves its native country, and, as if it had been ashamed to be caressed too near its mother, it repulsed murmuring the hand I put forth playfully to touch it; the animals that came there to drink, more reasonable than those of our world, showed their surprise at seeing it was full day above the horizon while yet they saw the Sun in the Antipodes and scarcely dared to lean over the brink lest they should fall into the firmament.[32]
I cannot choose but admit that the sight of so many fair objects tickled me with those agreeable pangs the embryo is said to feel when the soul is infused in it! My old hair fell out and was replaced by thicker and finer tresses; I felt my youth re-lighted, my face grow rosy, my natural heat mingle gently once more with my radical moisture; in fine, my age diminished some fourteen years.
I had walked half a league through a forest of jasmine and myrtles when I perceived something that moved, as it lay in the shade; it was a young man whose majestic beauty compelled me almost to adore him. He arose to restrain me.
"'Tis not to me", he exclaimed loudly, "but to God, that you owe these acts of submission!"
"You see me", I replied, "amazed with so many miracles that I know not how to begin the expression of my wonder. First I come from a world which you here no doubt take to be a Moon; and I thought to reach another, which the people of my country call the Moon, and I find myself in Paradise at the feet of a God who refuses to be adored, of a stranger who speaks my language."
"Except for the attribute of God", he replied, "what you say is true; this Earth is the Moon which you see from your Globe and the place where you walk is Paradise, but it is the Earthly Paradise into which only six people have ever entered: Adam, Eve, Enoch, Myself who am old Elijah, Saint John the Evangelist and you. You know very well how the two first were banished hence but you do not know how they came to your World. Know then that when they had both tasted the forbidden apple, Adam, fearful lest God should be further irritated by his presence and increase his punishment, considered the Moon, your Earth, as the sole refuge wherein he could shelter from the vengeance of his Creator. Well, at that time man's imagination was so strong, being not yet corrupted by debaucheries, by coarse foods or by the weakening of diseases, that when he was excited by a violent desire to reach this refuge his whole body became lightened through the fire of this enthusiasm and he was uplifted just as certain philosophers, whose imagination has been greatly moved by something, have been carried into the air by transports which you call ecstatic. Eve who was weaker and not so hot, because of the infirmity of her sex, doubtless would not have possessed an imagination able to conquer by the mere strength of its will the weight of matter, but since she had been but a little time made out of her husband's body the sympathy which still bound this portion to the original whole carried her after him as he went up, just as amber is followed by a straw, as the loadstone turns to the north from whence it has been torn. And Adam attracted this part of himself as the sea attracts the rivers which are made out of her. When they reached your Earth they took up their abode between Mesopotamia and Arabia; the Hebrews knew him by the name of Adam and the idolaters by the name of Prometheus, feigned by their poets to have stolen fire from Heaven, because the progeny he begot were endowed with a soul as perfect as that which God had filled him with; thus the first man left this world deserted to inhabit yours, but the All-Wise willed that so happy a dwelling-place should not remain uninhabited and a few centuries later he granted Enoch permission to leave the company of mankind, whose innocence had become corrupted. This holy personage considered that no retreat was secure against the ambition of his relatives (who were already cutting each other's throats for the possession of your world) except that happy land whereof Adam, his grandfather, had formerly talked so much. Yet how was he to get there? Jacob's Ladder was not yet invented! The grace of the Most High supplied the deficiency by causing Enoch to observe that the fire from Heaven descended upon the sacrifices of the just and of those who were acceptable before the face of the Lord, according to the word of His mouth: 'The savour of the just man's sacrifices has reached me.' One day when this divine flame was fiercely consuming a victim which he offered to the Eternal, he filled two large vessels with the vapour it gave off, sealed them hermetically and attached them under his arm-pits. The smoke immediately had a tendency to rise straight up to God and, not being able to penetrate the metal save by a miracle, bore the vessels upwards and in the same way carried with them this holy man.[33] When he reached the Moon and looked upon this fair garden an almost supernatural out-pouring of joy showed him that it was the Earthly Paradise wherein his grandfather had formerly dwelt. He promptly loosened the vessels which he had bound like wings on to his shoulders and did so with so much good fortune that he was scarce four toises in the air above the Moon when he took leave of his bladders. However he was sufficiently high up to have been sadly hurt had not the wind borne up the ample skirts of his robe.[34] The ardour of the fire of charity sustained him also. As to the vessels they continued to rise until God set them in the Heavens and they are what you to-day call the Balance, showing us every day that they are still full of the odours of a just man's sacrifice by the favourable influences they exert on the horoscope of Louis the Just, who had the Balance as his ascendant.
"Enoch nevertheless was not yet in this garden; he arrived there some time later. This was during the flood when the waters which engulfed your world rose to so prodigious a height that the Ark swam in the Heavens beside the Moon. The human beings within saw this globe through the window but the light reflected from this great opaque body was weakened because they were so near that they shared it and so each of them thought it was a part of the Earth not yet flooded. One daughter of Noah, named Achab, alone maintained tooth and nail that it was positively the Moon, perhaps because she had noticed they had approached this body as the ship rose. They pointed out to her that the sounding-line marked but fifteen fathoms of water; she only replied that the lead must have touched the back of a whale which they took for Earth and that for her part she was well assured it was the Moon in person they were about to board. In fine, since each one follows the opinion of his like, all the other women in turn grew convinced of it and in spite of the men's prohibition they launched the skiff on the water. Achab was the most daring and desired to be the first to affront the peril. She threw herself gaily into the boat and would have been followed by all those of her sex had not a wave separated her from the ship. They called to her, said she was a hundred times lunatic, vowed that through her every woman would one day be reproached for having a quarter of the Moon in her head—she did but flout them. There she was sailing outside the world. The animals followed her example, for most of the birds, impatient at the first prison that had ever restrained their liberty, flew thither if they felt their wings strong enough to risk the journey. The boldest of the quadrupeds even began to swim. More than a thousand got out before Noah's sons could shut the stables which were kept open by the crowd of animals rushing through. Most of them reached this new world. As for the skiff, it grounded upon a very pleasant hill where the courageous Achab landed. Delighted at having recognised that this Earth was indeed the Moon she was unwilling to embark again and join her brothers. She spent some time in a cave and one day as she was walking out, debating whether she were sorry or very glad to have lost the company of her relatives, she saw a man knocking down acorns. The joy of such a meeting made her fly to embrace him, and she received the like from him, for it was still longer since the old man had seen a human face. It was Enoch the Just. They lived together, begat posterity and had he not been obliged to withdraw into the woods by the original sin of his children and the pride of his wife, they would have passed the remainder of their days together with all the comfort God bestows as a blessing upon the marriage of the Just. There, every day in the wildest retreats of these terrible solitudes he offered up to God with a purified spirit his heart as a sacrifice. One day the Tree of Knowledge, which as you know is in this garden, dropped an apple in the river on whose bank it is planted and the fruit was carried out of Paradise by the waves to a place where poor Enoch was fishing to gain his scanty subsistence. This beautiful fruit was caught in his net and he ate it. Immediately he knew where the Earthly Paradise was and he came to live in it by secret means which you cannot conceive if you have not eaten, as he did, the Apple of Knowledge.
"Now I must tell you the manner in which I came here myself. You have not forgotten, I suppose, that my name is Elijah, for I told you so just now. You must know then that I was in your world and that I dwelt with Elisha, a Hebrew like myself, on the banks of the Jordan where I spent among books a life pleasant enough not to make me regret that it was continually passing away. However, as the enlightenment of my spirit increased, the knowledge of the enlightenment I did not possess increased also. Whenever our priests reminded me of Adam I could not forbear sighing at the recollection of that perfect Philosophy he had possessed. I despaired of being able to acquire it, when one day, after I had sacrificed to expiate the sins of my mortal Being, I fell asleep and the Angel of the Lord appeared to me in a dream. As soon as I awoke I failed not to labour at those things he had commanded me; I took of loadstone two square feet and cast it into a furnace, and when it was purged, precipitated and dissolved, I drew out the attractive principle, calcined the whole elixir and reduced it to the bulk of a medium-sized ball.
"Following upon these preparations I had made a very light chariot of iron and some months later, all my engines being completed, I entered my ingenious cart. Perhaps you will ask what was the use of this appliance? Know then that the Angel told me in my dream that if I desired to acquire the perfect knowledge I wished for I should rise from the world to the Moon, where I should find the Tree of Knowledge in Adam's Paradise and as soon as I had tasted its fruit my soul would perceive all the truths a created mind can perceive. For this voyage I had built my chariot. I got into it and when I was well and firmly seated in it I cast the loadstone ball high into the air. Now I had expressly made my iron machine thicker in the middle than at the ends and so it was lifted immediately in perfect equilibrium because it moved always more eagerly in that part. Thus, directly I arrived where the loadstone had drawn me I threw up the ball again in the air above me."
"But", I interrupted, "how did you throw the ball so straight above your chariot that it never went sideways?"
"I see nothing astounding in this adventure", said he, "for when the loadstone was cast into the air it attracted the iron straight to it and consequently it was impossible that I should rise sideways. I must tell you that I held the ball in my hand and continued to rise because the chariot rushed always towards the loadstone which I held above it; but the movement of the iron to join with the ball was so vigorous that it bent my body double and I dared not attempt the new experiment more than once. In truth it was a very surprising spectacle to behold, for I had polished the steel of this flying house carefully and it reflected on all sides the light of the Sun so keenly and sharply that I myself thought I was being carried away in a chariot of fire. At length after I had many times thrown the ball upwards and had flown after it, I arrived (as you did) at a place where I began to fall towards this world; and because at that moment I happened to be holding the loadstone ball tightly in my hands my chariot pressed against me to approach the body which attracted it and therefore did not leave me. All I had to fear now was breaking my neck, but to preserve myself from that I threw up the ball from time to time so that my machine, feeling itself attracted back, would rest and so break the force of my fall. Finally, when I was about two or three hundred toises above the ground I threw the ball out on either side level with the chariot, sometimes in the one direction and sometimes in the other, until my eyes discovered the Earthly Paradise. Immediately I failed not to throw my loadstone above it and, when the machine followed, I let myself fall until I saw I was about to be hurled against the ground; then I threw the ball upwards a foot only above my head and this little cast diminished altogether the speed I had acquired in falling so that my descent was no more violent than if I had jumped down my own height. I will not describe to you my amazement at the sight of the marvels which are here, because it was very similar to that which I perceive has just perturbed you.
"You must know, however, that the next day I came upon the Tree of Life, by whose means I prevented myself from growing old. Age very soon disappeared and the serpent went up in smoke."
At these words I said: "Venerable and holy Patriarch, I should be happy to know what you mean by this serpent which disappeared."
With a laughing face he replied thus: "I forgot, O my son, to reveal to you a secret which could not hitherto have been imparted to you. You must know then that after Eve and her husband had eaten the forbidden apple, God punished the serpent that had tempted them by confining it in man's body. Since then in punishment for the crime of the first father every human being who is born nourishes in his belly a serpent, the issue of the first one. You call this the bowels and think them necessary for the functions of life, but learn that they are nothing else than a serpent coiled upon itself in several folds. When you hear your guts rumble, it is the serpent that hisses and, according to that gluttonous nature with which he formerly incited the first man to eat too much, asks for food himself. God, to punish you, desired to make you mortal like other animals, and caused you to be possessed by this insatiable beast, to the intent that if you feed him too much you choke yourself or, if you refuse him his pittance when the starveling gnaws your stomach with his invisible teeth, then he rumbles, he rages, he pours out that venom which doctors call bile and so heats you with the poison he pours into your arteries that you are soon destroyed by it. Finally, to show you that your bowels are a serpent you have in your body, remember serpents were found in the graves of Æsculapius, Scipio, Alexander, Charles Martel and Edward of England, still feeding upon the corpses of their hosts."
"Truly", said I, interrupting him, "I have observed that since this serpent is always trying to escape from man's body his head and neck may be seen projecting from the lower part of our bellies. But God did not permit man alone to be tormented by it, he willed that it should rise up against woman to cast its venom upon her and that the swelling should last nine months after she had been bitten. And to prove to you that I speak according to the word of the Lord, He said to the serpent (to curse it) that though it might make woman fall by rising up against her, she would make it lower its head."
I would have continued these trifles but Elijah prevented me: "Remember", said he, "that this place is holy." He then remained silent some time as if to recollect the place in which he dwelt, and continued in these words: "I only taste the Fruit of Life every hundred years. The taste of its juice somewhat resembles spirits. I think it was the apple that Adam had eaten which caused our earliest forefathers to live so long, because something of its energy had flowed into their seed and was only extinguished in the waters of the flood.[35] The Tree of Knowledge is planted opposite. Its fruit is covered with a rind which produces ignorance in anyone who tastes it and preserves under the thickness of this peel the spiritual virtues of that learned food. After Adam was expelled from this blessed land God rubbed his gums with this peel, lest he should find the way back to it again. For more than fifteen years after this time he doted and forgot everything so completely that neither he nor his progeny down to Moses remembered the creation. But the remains of the power of this weighty peel were finally dissipated by the warmth and light of that great Prophet's genius. Happily I began on one of the apples which was so ripe it had shed its skin and my saliva had scarcely dampened it when universal Philosophy took me by the nose. It seemed to me that an infinite number of little eyes sank into my head and I knew at once how to converse with the Lord. Afterwards when I reflected upon this miraculous removal I felt that I could not have overcome merely through the occult virtues of a simple body the vigilance of the Seraph whom God placed on guard over this Paradise. But since it pleases Him to make use of secondary causes I thought He had inspired me with this means of entering it as He had made use of Adam's ribs to create a woman, although He could have formed her out of earth as well as the man.
"I remained for a long time in this garden walking without a companion. But at last, as the Angel at the Gate of the place was my principal host, I felt a desire to speak to him. An hour's walking ended my journey, for at the expiration of this time I reached a country where a thousand flashes of lightning confounding themselves into one formed a blinding daylight which served but to make darkness visible.
"I had not yet recovered from this adventure when I saw a fair young man before me. 'I am', said he, 'the Archangel you are seeking and I have just read in God that He had suggested to you the means of coming here and that He desires you to await His pleasure.' He conversed with me on several subjects and among other things told me that the light at which I had seemed frightened had nothing formidable about it, that it lighted up almost every evening when he was making his rounds because, in order to avoid the artifices of sorcerers, who enter everywhere without being seen, he was forced to indulge in broad sword play with his flaming brand all round the Earthly Paradise and that this light was caused by the flashing of his steel. 'Those which you perceive from your World', he added, 'are produced by me. If you see them sometimes afar off, that is because the clouds of a distant country, being disposed to receive this impression, reflect on to you these light images of fire, just as vapour differently placed is disposed to make a rainbow. I will not tell you any more, because the Apple of Knowledge is not far from here and as soon as you have eaten of it you will be as learned as I. But above all take care of this mistake; most of the fruits which hang on that plant are covered with a rind and if you taste it you will descend beneath Man, whereas the inner part will uplift you as high as the Angels.'"
Elijah had reached this point in the instructions the Angel had given him when a little man joined us. "This is the Enoch of whom I have spoken", whispered my guide. As he spoke, Enoch presented us with a basket filled with I know not what fruits, similar to pomegranates, which he had discovered that day in a retired grove. I put some of them in my pockets at Elijah's command, when Enoch asked who I was.
"'Tis an adventure which merits a longer conversation", answered my guide, "this evening when we go to bed he will tell us himself the miraculous details of his journey."
As he said this we reached a kind of hermitage made of palm branches ingeniously interwoven with myrtles and orange-trees. There I perceived in a little corner several heaps of a certain thread so white and so fine that it might have passed for the spirit of snow. I saw also spindles lying here and there. I asked my guide what they were used for and he replied, "To spin. When the good Enoch wishes to unbend from his meditations, sometimes he dresses the thread, and sometimes he weaves the linen which serves to make chemises for the eleven thousand virgins. You must have met sometimes in your world with something that floats through the air in the autumn about harvest-time. The peasants call it, 'Our Lady's cotton', but it is really the waste which Enoch clears off the linen as he makes it."
We went away without taking leave of Enoch, who lived in this hut, and we were obliged to depart from him so soon, because he prays every six hours, and that time had fully elapsed since his last orison.
As we went along I besought Elijah to conclude the story of the assumptions he had begun, and I told him that I thought he had broken off at the story of Saint John the Evangelist.
"Since you have not the patience", said he, "to wait until the Apple of Knowledge teaches you all these things far better than I can, I will tell you. Know then that God...."
At this word I know not how the Devil interfered, but I could not prevent myself from interrupting him waggishly:
"I remember", said I, "God was one day informed that the soul of this Evangelist was so detached that he only retained it by clenching his teeth. The Eternal Wisdom was mightily surprised at so unexpected an accident, exclaiming: 'Alas! He must not taste death. He is predestined to rise up to the Earthly Paradise in his flesh and bones. Yet the hour wherein I had foreseen he should be uplifted has almost expired! Just Heavens! What will men say of Me when they know I have been mistaken?' Thus to cover up His mistake the Eternal was constrained in His irresolution to cause him to be there without having the time to make him go there."
All the time I was speaking Elijah gazed at me with eyes that would have killed me had I been in a condition to die of anything but hunger.
"Abominable wretch!" said he, recoiling from me, "you have the impudence to banter holy things and assuredly it would not be with impunity if the All-Wise did not wish to leave you as a famous example of His pity to all nations. Hence, thou impious fellow, go from here, publish in this little world and in the other (for you are predestined to return there) the irreconcilable hatred of God to Atheists."
He had scarcely finished this imprecation when he seized hold of me and began to drag me roughly towards the gate. When we came near a large tree, whose branches were weighed almost to the ground by their burden of fruit, he said: "That is the Tree of Knowledge from which you would have drawn inconceivable enlightenment had you not been so irreligious."
He had not finished speaking when, pretending to faint with weakness, I stumbled against a branch from which I nimbly stole an apple. I had still several steps to make before I should get out of this delightful park but I was so violently attacked by hunger that I forgot I was in the hands of an angry prophet, pulled out one of the apples I had put in my pocket and thrust my teeth into it. But instead of taking one of those which Enoch had given to me, my hand fell on the apple I had picked from the Tree of Knowledge, which unfortunately I had not peeled.
I had scarcely tasted it when a thick night descended upon my soul; I did not see my apple any more nor Elijah beside me and my eyes did not recognise a single trace of the Earthly Paradise in the whole hemisphere, yet I did not cease to remember all that had happened to me there.
Afterwards, reflecting on this miracle, I supposed that the rind of this fruit did not wholly stupefy me, because my teeth went through it and felt a little of the inner juice, whose energy dispelled the malignities of the peel.
I was vastly surprised to find myself all alone in the midst of a land I did not know. I turned my eyes about me and gazed over the country, but no living thing presented itself to console me. At last I resolved to walk forward until Fortune brought me into the company of some creature or of death. She heard me favourably, for at the end of a half-quarter of an hour I met with two very large animals, one of which stayed before me while the other ran swiftly towards its den; at least I thought so, because a little time later I saw it return with more than seven or eight hundred of the same species, who surrounded me. When I could examine them near at hand I perceived that their body and face were like ours. This adventure made me remember the stories I had heard my nurse tell formerly about sirens, fauns and satyrs; from time to time they set up such furious shriekings, caused no doubt by their wonder at seeing me, that I almost thought I had become a monster.
One of these beast-men seized me by the neck, as wolves do when they carry off a sheep, cast me upon his back and took me to their town. I was greatly astounded when I saw that they were indeed men and yet every one I met walked on four legs. When the people saw me pass, seeing I was so small (for most of them are twelve cubits high) and that my body was supported by two feet only, they could not believe I was a man; for they hold that as Nature has given men two arms and two legs like the beasts, they ought to use them in the same way. And indeed, musing on this subject afterwards, I have thought that this position of the body was not so extravagant, for I recollected that our children walk on four feet when they are taught by Nature alone and only rise on two feet through the care of their nurses who set them in little carts and tie them with straps to prevent their falling on four feet, which is the only position wherein the shape of our body tends to repose.
At that time they said (according to the interpretation made to me afterwards) that I was certainly the female of the Queen's little animal. As this or as something else I was carried to the town hall, where I noticed from the buzz and the gestures made by the people and the magistrates that they were arguing together about what I might be. When they had talked together for a long time a certain citizen who kept rare beasts begged the aldermen to lend me to him until the Queen sent for me to live with my male. No objection was made. This mountebank took me to his home; he taught me to play the buffoon, to throw somersaults, to make grimaces and in the afternoon he took money at the door for showing me.[36]
At length Heaven, moved by my misfortunes and displeased to see the Temple of its Master profaned, willed that one day when I was tied to the end of a cord with which the mountebank made me leap to amuse the mob, one of those looking on gazed at me very attentively and at length asked me in Greek who I was. I was vastly surprised to hear him speak there as in our world. He questioned me for some time; I replied and told him afterwards in general terms what I had undertaken and the success of my voyage. He consoled me and I remember that he said: "Well, my son, you suffer the penalties of the failings of your world at last. Here, as there, exists a mob which cannot endure the thought of things to which it is not accustomed, but know that you receive a reciprocal treatment, for if someone from this earth should rise to yours and have the boldness to call himself a man, your learned men would have him smothered as a monster or as an ape possessed by a Devil." He promised me afterwards that he would inform the Court of my disaster; he added that as soon as he looked at me his heart told him I was a man, because he had formerly travelled to the world whence I came, that my country was the Moon, that I was a Gaul and that he had once lived in Greece, where he was called the Demon of Socrates and that after the death of this philosopher he had directed and instructed Epaminondas at Thebes; that afterwards he had passed over to the Romans, where Justice had attached him to the party of the younger Cato; then, that after his death he had devoted himself to Brutus; that since these great personages had left nothing behind them in the world but the phantom of their virtues, he retired with his companions sometimes to the temples, sometimes into solitude. "At last", he added, "the people of your world became so stupid and so gross that my companions and I lost all the pleasure we once had in teaching them. You must inevitably have heard us spoken of. They called us Oracles, Nymphs, Genii, Fairies, Hearth-gods, Lemures, Larvae, Lamias, Hobgoblins, Naiades, Incubi, Shades, Ghosts, Spectres, Phantoms. We left your World in the reign of Augustus a little after the time when I appeared to Drusus, the son of Livia, who was waging war in Germany, and forbade him to proceed further. It is not long since I returned thence for the second time. During the last hundred years I was instructed to travel there, I wandered about in Europe and conversed with persons whom you may have known. One day I appeared to Cardan as he was reading; I instructed him in many things and in recompense he promised me that he would bear witness to posterity that I was the person from whom he obtained knowledge of the miracles he proposed to write. I saw Agrippa, Abbot Tritheim, Doctor Faust, La Brosse, César[37] and a certain group of young men, known to the uninitiate by the name of Knights of the Rosy-Cross, to whom I imparted a number of artifices and natural secrets which no doubt will have caused the people to consider them great magicians. I knew Campanella[38] also. When he was in the inquisition at Rome it was I who advised him to conform his face and body to the usual grimaces and postures of those whose inner mind he needed to know, so that he might excite in himself by a similar position the thoughts which this same situation had called up in his adversaries; because he would treat better with their soul when he knew it. At my request he began a book, which we called De Sensu Rerum. Similarly in France I frequented La Mothe Le Vayer and Gassendi[39]: the second is a man who has written as much philosophy as the first has lived. I know there are numbers of other men whom your age considers divine, but I found nothing in them save a vast deal of chatter and pride.
"When I left your country for England to study the manners of its inhabitants I met a man who is the shame of his country; for certainly it is a shame to the great men of your state who recognize in him, yet fail to adore, the virtue of which he is the throne. To cut short his panegyric; he is all Wit, he is all Heart, and if by giving both these qualities (one of which formerly sufficed to mark a hero) to one person were not as good as naming Tristan L'Hermite,[40] I should not have mentioned his name, for I am sure he will not forgive me for this indiscretion. But as I do not expect ever to return to your World I desire to bear witness to this truth for my conscience's sake. Truly I must tell you that when I saw so high a virtue I feared that it was not recognized; for this reason I tried to make him accept three phials. The first was full of oil of Talc, the second of the powder of projection, and the third of potable Gold, that is to say, the vegetable salt whose eternity is promised by your chemists. But he refused them with a disdain more generous than that with which Diogenes received the compliments of Alexander who came to visit him in his tub. Finally I can add nothing to the praise of this great man except that he is the only Poet, the only Philosopher and the only free Man that you have. These are the eminent persons with whom I have conversed; all the others, at least those I knew, are so far below men that I have seen beasts who were above them.
"For the rest, I am not an inhabitant of your earth nor of this; I was born in the Sun; but because our world is sometimes overpeopled on account of the long life of its inhabitants and the fact that it is practically free from wars and diseases, our rulers from time to time send out colonies to the surrounding worlds. I was ordered to go to your Earth and declared leader of the expedition sent out with me. Since then I have come to this world for the reasons I told you; and I remain here because these men are lovers of truth; there are no pedants to be seen here, the philosophers allow themselves to be convinced by reason alone and neither the authority of a learned man nor numbers can overwhelm the opinion of a corn-thresher if the corn-thresher reason powerfully. In short the only madmen recognised in this country are the sophists and the orators."
I asked him how long they lived; he replied, "Three or four thousand years", and continued in this manner: "To render myself visible as I am now, when I feel the corpse I dwell in almost used up or when the organs do not exercise their functions perfectly, I breathe myself into a young body that has recently died.
"Although the inhabitants of the Sun are not so numerous as those of this World, nevertheless the Sun is often overcrowded, because the people are of a very hot temperament and consequently restless, ambitious and voracious.
"What I tell you ought not to seem a marvellous thing; for, although our globe is very vast and yours small, although we only die at the end of four thousand years and you after half a century, learn that, just as there are not so many pebbles as earth, nor so many insects as plants, nor so many animals as insects, nor so many men as animals; so there cannot be so many demons as men, because of the difficulties to be met with in the generation of so perfect a composition."
I asked him if they were bodies like us. He replied that, yes, they were bodies, but not like us nor like anything that we consider such, because we call vulgarly a body that which can be touched; for the rest, there was nothing in Nature that was not material,[41] and although they were material themselves, when they wished to be seen by us they were forced to take bodies such as our senses are capable of perceiving.
I assured him that many in the world thought the stories told of them were only an effect of the fancy of feeble-minded individuals, seeing that they only appeared at night. He replied that, since they were forced to build themselves hastily the bodies they had to make use of, they often had only time enough to fit them for a single sense, sometimes hearing, as the voices of Oracles; sometimes sight, as Will-o'-the-Wisps and Spectres; sometimes touch, as Incubi and Nightmares; and that this mass being only thickened air, the light destroyed it with its heat just as we see it disperse a fog by expanding it.
All these things he explained to me aroused in me the curiosity to question him about his birth and death; if in the country of the Sun the individual saw the day by the means of generation, and whether he died through the disintegration of his mind or the breaking down of his organs.
"There is too little connection", said he, "between your senses and the explanation of these mysteries. You imagine that what you cannot comprehend is spiritual or that it does not exist; the inference is false, but it is a proof that the universe contains perhaps a million things, to know which you would require a million different organs. Thus, I conceive through my senses the cause of the loadstone's turning to the north, the cause of the tides, and what an animal becomes after death; but you cannot rise to these high conceptions because there is nothing in you related to these miracles, any more than a child born blind can imagine the beauty of a landscape, the colouring of a picture, the tints of the rainbow; rather he will imagine them at one time as something palpable, then as something to eat, then as a sound, then as an odour. So if I tried to explain to you what I perceive through senses which you lack you would conceive it as something which can be heard, seen, touched, smelled or tasted, when it is nothing of the kind."
He was at this point of his discourse when my mountebank saw the company was growing weary of our jargon, for they could not understand it and mistook it for an inarticulate grunting. He began to pull heartily at my cord and made me gambol until the spectators had their fill of mirth and vowed I was nearly as clever as the animals in their country, and so went off to their homes.
The harshness of my master's bad treatment was softened by the visits of this obliging demon; I could not converse with those who came to see me, since they took me for an animal deeply rooted in the category of brutes; I did not know their language, they did not know mine! Judge then what relation there was between us.
You must know that two idioms are used in that country, one of which serves the nobles while the other is peculiar to the people.
The language of the nobles is simply different tones not articulated, very much like our music when no words have been added to it. Certainly it is an invention altogether useful and agreeable, for when they are tired of speaking, or when they disdain to prostitute their throats to this usage, they take a lute or some other instrument, with whose aid they communicate their thought as easily as by the voice; so that sometimes fifteen or twenty of them may be met with debating a point of theology or the difficulties of a law case in the most harmonious concert that could tickle one's ears.[42]
The second, which is used by the people, is carried out by movements of the limbs, though perhaps not precisely as you imagine, for certain parts of the body mean a whole speech. For example, the movement of a finger, of a hand, of an ear, of a lip, of an arm, of a cheek, will make singly a discourse or a sentence; others are only used to designate words, such as a wrinkle in the forehead, different shiverings of the muscles, turnings of the hands, stampings of the foot, contortions of the arm, so that, as it is their custom to go quite naked, when they talk their limbs (which are accustomed to gesticulate their ideas) move so briskly that it does not seem a man talking but a body trembling.
The demon came to visit me almost every day and his marvellous conversation helped me to endure the miseries of captivity without repining. One morning a man whom I did not know came into my lodging, and having well stroked me for a long time, gently lifted me up under the arm-pit; then, holding me with one hand lest I should be hurt, cast me upon his back, where I found myself seated so softly and so comfortably that although I was afflicted to find myself treated like a beast I had no desire to escape. Moreover these four-footed men move with a swiftness different from ours, since the heaviest of them can catch a running deer.
I was vastly perturbed at having no news of my courteous demon and on the evening of the first day's journey, after I had reached the inn, I was walking in the courtyard waiting for supper when my carrier, whose face was young and handsome, came up to me, laughing before my nose, and cast his two forefeet around my neck. After I had gazed at him for a while he said to me in French: "What! Do you not know your friend?" I leave you to imagine what I then felt. My surprise was so great that thereafter I imagined that the whole globe of the Moon, all that happened to me there, everything that I saw there, were an enchantment. The man-beast who had served me as a steed continued to speak in these words: "You had promised that the favours I did you would never leave your memory."
I protested that I had never seen him. At last he said: "I am that demon of Socrates who entertained you during the time of your captivity. As I had promised you, I left yesterday to inform the King of your misfortune and I covered three hundred leagues in eighteen hours, for I arrived at midday to await you...."
"But", I interrupted, "how can all this be, seeing that yesterday you were extremely tall and to-day you are very short; yesterday you had a weak broken voice and to-day it is strong and clear; in short, yesterday you were a hoary old man and to-day you are a young man? What! While in my country we travel from birth to death, do the animals of this land go from death to birth; do they grow younger the older they are?"
"When I had spoken to the Prince", said he, "and had received his order to bring you to him, I felt the body I inhabited so worn out with lassitude that all its organs refused their functions. I inquired the way to the hospital, went there, and as soon as I entered the first room found a young man who had just given up the ghost. I approached the body and feigning to have recognised movement in it I protested to all present that he was not dead, that his disease was not even dangerous, and without being perceived I skilfully breathed myself into him. My old body immediately fell backwards; and I rose up in this young one.[43] They exclaimed at the miracle, but without arguing with any one I went off promptly to your mountebank, where I took you up."
He would have told me more but they came to fetch us for supper. My conductor led me into a magnificently furnished room but I saw nothing prepared to eat. Such a lack of meat when I was perishing of hunger forced me to ask him where the table was laid. I did not hear what he replied, for three or four young boys, the host's children, came up to me at that instant and with great civility undressed me to the shirt. This new ceremonial vastly astonished me, but I dared not ask its reason of my handsome attendants; and when my guide asked how I should like to begin I know not how I was able to reply with these two words: "A soup". Immediately I smelt the odour of the most succulent simmering that ever hit the nose of a rich sinner. I tried to get up from my place to track down with my nose the source of this agreeable vapour, but my guide prevented me: "Where are you going?" said he, "we will take a walk soon, but this is the time to eat; finish your soup and then we will have something else."
"But where the devil is the soup?" cried I in a rage. "Have you made a wager to banter me all day?"
"I thought", he replied, "that you had seen at the town whence we came either your master or someone else taking his meals; that is why I did not tell you of their methods of eating in this country. But since you are still ignorant of it, let me tell you that here they live on nothing but vapour. The art of cookery here is to enclose in large, specially moulded vessels the fumes which rise from meats and, having collected several kinds and several tastes, according to the appetite of those they entertain, they open the vessel which holds this odour and then another and then another until the company is quite satisfied. Unless you have already lived in this manner you will never believe that the nose unassisted by the teeth and throat can perform the office of the mouth in feeding a man; but I will make you see it by experience."
He had scarcely finished his promise when I smelled successively as they entered the room so many agreeable and nourishing vapours that I felt myself completely satisfied in less than a half-quarter of an hour. When we had risen he said: "This should not cause you a great deal of surprise, since you cannot have lived so long without having noticed that in your world cooks and pastry-cooks, who eat less than people of other occupations, are nevertheless fatter than they are. Whence is their fatness derived, unless it be from the smell of the food that perpetually surrounds them, penetrates their bodies and nourishes them? People in this world enjoy a more vigorous and less interrupted health, because their food causes hardly any excrements, which are the origin of almost all diseases. You were surprised perhaps when they undressed you before the meal, because the custom is never employed in your country, but here it is, and it is done in order that the animal may imbibe the vapour more easily."
"Sir", said I, "what you say appears very probable and I myself have just experienced something of it, but I must confess I cannot de-brutalise myself so promptly, and I should be very glad to have a solid morsel under my teeth."
He promised it, but only for the next day, because he said that to eat so soon after a meal would give me indigestion. We continued talking some time and then went up to our room to go to bed.
At the top of the staircase we were met by a man who gazed very attentively upon us and then conducted me to a cabinet whose floor was covered with orange flowers to the depth of three feet; and took my demon into another filled with carnations and jasmine. Seeing that I appeared amazed at this magnificence he told me this was the method of making beds in that country. At last we each lay down in our chamber and as soon as I was stretched out on my flowers I perceived by the light of thirty large glow-worms enclosed in a crystal (for they use no other candle) the three or four young boys who had undressed me at supper, one of whom began to tickle my feet, another my thighs, another my flanks, another my arms, so delicately and nicely that in less than a moment I fell asleep.
Next morning my demon entered with the sun. "I have kept my word", said he, "you shall break your fast more substantially than you supped last night." At these words I got up and he led me by the hand to a place behind the inn garden where one of the host's children awaited us with a weapon in his hand very like one of our guns. He asked my guide if I should like a dozen larks, because baboons (that is what he took me for) fed on this meat. I had scarcely answered yes, when the sportsman fired in the air and twenty or thirty well-roasted larks fell at our feet. There! thought I at once, and we have a proverb in our world about a land where the larks fall ready roasted! Doubtless someone who had come from here.
"You have but to eat", said my demon, "they are skilful enough to mix with their powder and shot a composition which kills, plucks, roasts and seasons their game."
On his recommendation I picked up and ate some of them, and truly I had never in my life tasted anything so delicious.
After breakfast we prepared to depart and with a thousand grimaces, which they use to show their politeness, the host accepted a paper from my demon. I asked him if this were a note of hand for the amount of the bill. He answered, no, he owed him nothing, and that the paper contained verses.
"Verses!" I answered, "are the tavern-keepers here so fond of rhymes?"
"'Tis the money of the country ", replied he, "and our expenses at this place came to a sixain, which I have just given him. I was not afraid of being short of money, for even though we feasted here for eight days we should not spend a sonnet, and I have four on me, with nine epigrams, two odes and an eclogue."
Ha! said I to myself, that is precisely the money which Sorel makes Hortensius use in "Francion" I remember.[44] Doubtless he stole it from here; but how the devil can he have learnt it? It must have been from his mother, for I have heard it said that she was Lunatic.
I asked my demon then if these verses served always as money, as often as they were copied out; he said they did not and continued thus: "When an author has composed some verses he carries them to the mint, where the sworn poets of the kingdom hold their sessions. There the verifying officers test the pieces and if they are judged to be of a good alloy they are estimated, not according to their weight, but according to their wit, and so no one dies of hunger except the blockheads, and men of wit live in perpetual good cheer."
I wondered in a kind of ecstasy at the judicious polity of that country and he went on in this way: "There are other people who keep inns in a very different way. When you leave them they ask of you, according to your expenses, a note of hand for the Next World; and when they have it they enter it in a tall ledger, which they call their account with God, much in this way:
Item: The value of so many verses delivered on such a day by such an one which God must repay me from the first funds that come in on presentation of this note of hand.
When they feel themselves ill and in danger of dying they have these registers torn into pieces and swallow them because they think that unless they are digested God cannot read them."
This conversation did not prevent us from continuing our journey, that is, my carrier went on all fours underneath me and I rode astride. I will not particularise any further the adventures which delayed us until we arrived at last at the King's residence. I was taken straight to the Palace. The Nobles received me with much more moderate surprise than the people had done when we passed through the streets, but their conclusion was the same, to wit, that I was without doubt the female of the Queen's little animal. My guide interpreted it thus, but he himself did not understand the enigma and did not know what the Queen's little animal was. We were soon enlightened on this point, for the King some time after commanded him to be brought thither. About half an hour afterwards a little man about my own size, walking on two legs, came in, accompanied by a troupe of monkeys wearing ruffs and Spanish slops. As soon as he saw me he accosted me with a "Criado de vouestra merced"; and I replied to his courtesy in similar terms.[45] Alas! they had no sooner seen us speak to each other than they all believed their prejudice had been truth, and this meeting produced no other result, for the opinion of the spectator most favourable to us was that our conversation was merely that we were grunting with joy at being coupled, and that a natural instinct made us hum. The little man told me he was an European, a native of old Castile, that by means of birds he had conveyed himself to the world of the Moon wherein we now were, that he fell into the Queen's hands and she had taken him for a monkey, because it happens they dress their monkeys in Spanish clothes, and that when she found him dressed in this manner on his arrival, she had not doubted he belonged to the species.
"We must suppose", I replied, "that after having tried all other kinds of clothes, they found none more ridiculous, and so they dressed them in this fashion, since they only keep these animals to amuse themselves."
"You do not understand", he said, "the dignity of our nation, since the universe only produced men for the purpose of giving us slaves, and for us Nature can only engender subjects of mirth."[46]
He then besought me to tell him how I had dared to rise to the Moon in the machine of which I had spoken to him. I replied that this was because he had taken away the birds on which I had intended to go. He smiled at this jest and about a quarter of an hour afterwards the King commanded his monkey-keeper to take us away, with strict orders to make the Spaniard and me lie together to multiply our species in his kingdom. The Prince's command was carried out in every point and I was very glad of it because of the pleasure I took in having some one to converse with during the solitude of my brutification. One day my male (they took me for the female) told me that the real reason that had obliged him to wander all over the earth and finally to abandon it for the Moon, was that he could not find a single country where even the imagination was free.
"Observe", said he, "unless you wear a square cap, a chaperon or a cassock, whatever excellent things you may say, if they are against the principles of these diplomaed doctors, you are an idiot, a madman or an atheist. In my own country they tried to put me into the Inquisition because I maintained to the very beard of these pig-headed pedants that there is a void in Nature and that I knew no matter in the world heavier than another."
I asked him with what probabilities he supported an opinion so little received, and he replied: "To understand that, you must suppose there is only one element; for although we see water, earth, air and fire separate, we never find them so perfectly pure but that they are mingled with each other. When, for example, you look at fire, it is not fire, it is nothing but air greatly expanded; air is only very extended water, and water is only melted earth; while the earth itself is nothing but very contracted water. Thus, by examining matter seriously you will find it is but one substance, which like an excellent actor plays many parts in many kinds of dresses here below. Otherwise we should have to admit as many elements as there are sorts of bodies. And if you ask me why fire burns and water cools, seeing that they are the same matter, I reply that this matter acts by sympathy according to the disposition it is in at the time it acts. Fire, which is nothing but earth still more expanded than it is when it makes air, tries to change all it meets with into itself by sympathy. Thus, the heat of coal, which is the most subtle fire and the most fit to penetrate a body, glides between the pores of our mass, at first makes us expand, because it is a new matter filling us and making us give off sweat; this sweat, expanded by the fire, changes into vapour and becomes air; this air, still further melted by the heat of the antiperistasis or of the globes that are neighbours to it, is called fire, and the earth, abandoned by the cold and by the damp which bind together all our parts, falls down as earth. On the other hand, water, although it only differs from the matter of fire in that it is more closely packed, does not burn us, because as it is contracted it sympathetically requires the bodies it meets to contract; so the cold we feel is nothing but the effect of our flesh, which retires upon itself through the neighbourhood of earth or water compelling it to resemble them. Hence dropsical patients, filled with water, change into water all the food they take; and similarly those who are bilious change into bile all the blood formed by their liver. But if you suppose that there is only one element it is very certain that all bodies, each according to its quality, incline equally to the centre of the earth.
"But you may ask why gold, iron, metals, earth and wood fall more rapidly to the centre than a sponge, if not because the last is filled with air which tends naturally upwards! That is not the reason at all and I reply to you in this way: Although a stone falls with more rapidity than a feather, both have the same inclination to fall; but, if the earth were pierced right through, a cannon-ball would fall more rapidly to the centre than a bladder filled with air. The reason for this is that this mass of metal is a great deal of earth squeezed into a small space and that this air is a very little earth expanded into a great deal of space; for all the particles of matter which reside in this iron, interlocked as they are with each other, increase their strength by union, because by being compact they form many fighting against few, since a portion of air equal in size to the bullet is not equal to it in quantity; and so, yielding under the burden of those more numerous than itself and as impatient, it allows itself to be broken through in order to give them free way.
"Not to prove this with a string of reasons: tell me truly how are we wounded by a pike, a sword or a dagger if it is not that steel is a matter whose particles are nearer together and more pressed against each other than those of our flesh, whose pores and whose softness show that it contains a very little matter spread through a wide space, and that the iron point which pierces us is an almost innumerable quantity of matter directed against a very little flesh, and so forces it to yield to the stronger party, just as a compact squadron pierces a whole line of battle which is widely extended? Why is a red-hot steel ingot hotter than a burning block of wood, if it is not because the ingot contains more fire in less space attached to all the particles of the piece of metal than there is in a log, which is very spongy and consequently contains a great deal of void; and, since void is simply the absence of Being, it cannot be susceptible to the form of fire? But, you will object, to me: 'You suppose a void as if you had proved it, and that is the very matter we are disputing!' Well! I will prove it to you, and although this difficulty is the sister of the Gordian knot, my arms are strong enough to be its Alexander.
"Let the stupid vulgar who only think they are men because a Doctor has told them so, answer me, I beg them. Admit there is only one matter, as I think I have proved: how does it happen that it expands and contracts according to its desire? How does it happen that a piece of earth by continually condensing becomes a pebble? Have the particles of this pebble entered into each other, in such a manner that where one grain of sand was placed, there, in the very same point, lodges another grain of sand? No, that cannot be, even according to their own principles, since bodies do not penetrate each other; but this matter must have drawn closer together and, if you will, have grown smaller by filling up the void space of its habitation.
"To say that it is incomprehensible for there to be nothing in the world and that we should be partly composed of nothing—eh! why not? Is not the whole world enveloped in nothing? Since you admit this point, confess that it is as easy for the world to have nothing inside it as nothing outside.
"I see very well that you are about to ask me why water, restrained by frost in a vase, bursts it, if not to prevent there being a void? But I reply that this only happens because the air above, which tends to the centre just as much as earth and water, meeting with a vacant lodging on the high-road to this country, goes to take up its abode there; if it finds the pores of this vessel, that is to say the roads which lead to this void room, too narrow, too long and too tortuous, by breaking the vase it satisfies its impatience to arrive more speedily at the resting-place.
"But, without wasting my time in answering all their objections, I dare to say that if there were no void there would be no movement, or we must admit the penetration of bodies; for it would be too ridiculous to believe that when a fly agitates a portion of air with its wing this portion drives another before it, this other portion drives another, and that thus the movement of a flea's little toe makes a bump beyond the world. When they are at their wits' end they take refuge in rarefaction; but, in good faith, when a body rarefies how can one particle of the mass draw away from another particle without leaving a void between them? Would it not have been necessary that these two bodies, which have just separated, should have been at the same time in the same place where this third was, and so that all three should have penetrated each other? I am quite prepared for you to ask me why we draw up water against its inclination through a tube, a syringe or a pump; but I reply that the water is compelled and that it does not turn from its road because of its fear of a void but because it is joined with the air by an imperceptible link and so is lifted up when we lift the air which holds it.
"This is not a thorny matter to understand for those who know the perfect circle and delicate chain of the Elements; for if you consider attentively the mud made by the marriage of earth and water you will find that it is neither earth nor water but that it is the medium of the contract of these two enemies; in the same way water and air reciprocally send out a mist which leans to the humours of both to procure their peace, and air reconciles itself with fire by a mediating exhalation which unites them."
I think he would have gone on talking but they brought us our food, and since we were hungry I shut my ears and he his mouth to open our stomachs.
I remember that when we were philosophizing on another occasion, for neither of us liked to converse of frivolous or low things, he said: "I am sorry to see a wit like yours infected with vulgar errors; you must know, in spite of the pedantry of Aristotle which rings to-day through all the class-rooms of your France, that all is in all; that is to say that in water, for example, there is fire, in fire there is water, in air there is earth, and in earth there is air. Although this opinion would make the Scolares open their eyes as wide as salt-cellars, it is easier to prove it than to get it accepted.
"First of all I ask them whether water does not engender fish. When they deny it I shall order them to dig a ditch and to fill it with syrup of water-jug which, if they like, they may pass through a sieve to escape the objections of the blind and if after some time they find no fish in it I will drink all the water they have put there; but if, as I do not doubt, they do find fish there, it is a certain proof that it contains salt and fire; consequently it is not a very difficult enterprise to find water in fire. Let them select a fire the most detached from matter, like comets, there is always a quantity of water in it; for if the unctuous humour which engenders them, reduced to sulphur by the heat of the antiperistasis which lights them, did not find an obstacle to its violence in the damp cold which tempers and combats it, it would be consumed in a flash. They will not deny that there is now air in the earth, or else they have never heard of the dreadful shakings which agitate the mountains of Sicily; moreover, we see that the earth is porous down even to the grains of sand which compose it. However, nobody has yet said that these hollows are filled with void; it will therefore not be thought objectionable to say that they contain air. It remains for me to prove that there is earth in the air; but I scarcely deign to take the trouble, since you may convince yourself of it as often as you see falling upon your heads those legions of motes, so numerous that they stifle arithmetic.
"But let us pass from simple to composite bodies. They will supply me with many more frequent subjects to prove that all things are in all things; not that they change into each other as your Peripatetics twitter, for I will maintain to their beards that first principles mingle, separate and mingle once more; so that what has once been created water by the wise Creator of the World will be so always; and I do not advance any maxim that I do not prove, as they do.
"Take, I beseech you, a log or some other combustible matter and set fire to it. When it is burnt up they will say that what was wood has become fire. But I maintain the contrary, and say that there is no more fire now when it is in flames than before a taper had been put to it; but the fire which was hidden in the log, prevented by cold and damp from expanding and acting, was supported by the foreign light, rallied its forces against the moisture which stifled it and took possession of the field occupied by its enemy. Thus it triumphs over its gaoler and shows itself without impediment. Do you not see how the water retreats by the two ends of the log, still hot and smoking from the fight? The upper flame you see is the most subtle fire and the freest from matter and therefore the most ready to return home; however, it unites in a pyramid up to a certain height in order to break through the thick dampness of the air resisting it. But as it mounts and frees itself little by little from the violent company of its enemies, it roves freely because it meets nothing hostile to its passage, and this negligence is often the cause of a second prison, for the fire, travelling separately, will lose itself sometimes in a cloud and if it meets there with a sufficiently large number of other fires to make head against the vapour they join together, they rumble, they thunder, they lighten and the death of innocent creatures is often the effect of the excited anger of dead things. If the fire is embarrassed by the importunate crudities of the middle region and is not strong enough to defend itself against them, it yields itself to the discretion of the cloud which, being constrained by its weight to fall back upon the earth, takes its prisoner with it and so this unhappy fire, enclosed in a drop of water, may perhaps find itself at the foot of an oak, whose animal fire will invite the poor wanderer to lodge with it. And thus it returns to the same state it left a few days before.
"But let us look at the fate of the other elements which compose this log. The air retreats to its quarters still confused with the vapour because the angry fire sharply drove them out pell-mell. There it is tossed by the winds like a bladder, gives breath to animals, fills the void made by nature and perhaps will be enveloped in a drop of dew, sucked in and digested by the thirsty leaves of the very tree to which our fire has retired. The water, which the flame had driven from its throne and the heat had raised to the cradle of the meteors, will fall back as rain upon our oak as likely as upon another. And the Earth, made ashes, cured of its sterility by the nourishing warmth of a dung-hill upon which it has been cast or by the vegetable salt of neighbouring plants or by the fertile water of rivers, perhaps will also find itself beside this same oak, the natural heat of whose germ will draw it up and make it a particle of the whole oak.
"In this manner all these four elements return to the same state they had left some days earlier; and in the same way a man has in him everything necessary to make up a tree, and there is in a tree everything necessary to make up a man. Finally, in this way all things are met with in all things, but we lack a Prometheus to draw from the bosom of Nature and make sensible to us that which I wish to call 'primary matter'."
These are approximately the things with which we passed the time, and truly this little Spaniard had a pretty wit. Our conversation took place only at night, because from six o'clock in the morning until the evening, the crowds of people who came to look at us in our lodging prevented it. Some threw stones at us, some nuts, some grass; there was no talk but of the King's beasts. They fed us every day at regular hours and the King and Queen themselves often were pleased to touch my belly to find out if I were not pregnant, for they burned with an extraordinary desire to have a race of these little animals. I do not know whether I was more attentive to their grimaces and intonations than my male, but I learned to understand their language and to use it a little. Immediately the news ran through the whole kingdom that there had been found two wild men, smaller than others because of the poor nourishment solitude had furnished us with, who from some defect in their fathers' seed possessed fore-legs too weak to walk upon.
This belief would have taken root by circulating had not the priests of the country opposed it, saying this was a horrible impiety to believe that not only beasts but monsters were of their species.
"It is far more likely", proceeded the least impassioned, "that our domestic animals should share the privilege of humanity and consequently of immortality, since they are born in our land, than a monstrous beast which says it was born somewhere in the Moon. Then consider the difference to be noted between us and them: we walk on four feet because God did not wish to confide so precious a thing to a position less firm, He feared some accident might happen to man; that is why He Himself took the trouble to set man upon four columns, so that he should not fall, but disdaining to interfere in the construction of these two beasts He abandoned them to the caprice of Nature, who, not considering the loss of so slight a thing, set them upon two feet only.
"The very birds", they said, "were not so badly treated as these, for at least they have received feathers to make up for the weakness of their feet and to cast themselves into the air when we turn them out of our houses; but by taking two feet from these monsters Nature has put them in the position of being unable to escape our justice.
"Moreover, observe how their heads are turned up towards Heaven! They are placed in this position through the scarcity of all things which God has imposed upon them, for this posture of supplication shows that they seek Heaven to complain to Him who created them and to ask His permission to make shift with our scraps. But we have our heads turned downwards to contemplate the good things whereof we are lords and as having nothing in Heaven for our happy condition to envy."
Every day in my lodging I heard the priests make up these or similar tales. At length they so directed the people's conscience in the matter that it was decreed I should at best be held for nothing more than a plucked parrot; and they confirmed those already persuaded by the fact that I had only two feet like a bird. I was put in a cage by a special order of the upper council.
There the Queen's falconer came every day to whistle to me as we do with starlings. I was happy in that my cage did not lack food; and from the follies with which the spectators deafened my ears I learned to speak like them.
When I understood the idiom sufficiently to express the greater part of my conceptions I showed them how I could talk. Already in gatherings people were speaking of nothing but the prettiness of my jests; and the esteem for my wit grew to such a point that the Clergy were forced to publish a decree forbidding any one to believe that I possessed reason, with a very strict command to all persons of whatever rank and condition they might be to believe that any intellectual thing I did was only through instinct.
However, the definition of what I was divided the Town into two factions; the party which took sides in my favour increased every day. At length in spite of the anathema and the excommunication of the Prophets who tried in this way to terrify the people, my supporters demanded an assembly of the Estates of the realm to resolve this religious hitch. It was a long time before they could agree on the choice of judges, but the arbitrators pacified animosity by making the judges consist of an equal number from each party.
They carried me openly to the court of justice, where I was severely treated by the examiners. Among other things they asked me my philosophy. In all good faith I showed them what I had formerly been taught by my Master, but they had no difficulty in refuting me with numerous reasons, which were in truth very convincing. When I found myself wholly refuted, so that I could not reply, as a last refuge I alleged the Principles of Aristotle, which were no more useful to me than his Sophisms, for they showed me their falsity in a few words.
"Aristotle", said they, "fitted principles to his philosophy instead of fitting his philosophy to principles. And at least he ought to have proved these principles to be more reasonable than those of other sects, which he could not do. For this reason the good man must not complain if we agree to differ from him."
At last when they saw that I kept bawling this and nothing else, save that they were not more learned than Aristotle, and that I had been forbidden to argue with those who denied his Principles, they concluded with one accord that I was not a man but perhaps some sort of ostrich, seeing I carried my head upright like that bird; and so the falconer was ordered to take me back to the cage. I passed my time amusingly enough, for my possessing correctly their language was a cause that the whole Court diverted itself by making me chatter. Among others the Queen's ladies-in-waiting always thrust some scraps of food into my basket, and the prettiest of them all conceived a certain friendship for me. Once when we were alone I discovered to her the mysteries of our religion and I discoursed principally of our bells and our relics; she was so transported with joy that she vowed with tears in her eyes that if ever I were able to fly back to our world she would gladly follow me.
One day I woke up early with a start and saw her tapping against the bars of my cage. "I have good news for you!" said she, "yesterday the council declared for war against the great King
; and I hope, with the bustle of preparation and the departure of our Monarch and his subjects, to find an opportunity to set you free."
"War!" I interrupted immediately, "do the Princes of this world quarrel among themselves like those of ours? Tell me, I beseech you, how they fight."
"The Umpires elected by the consent of both parties", she replied, "fix the time allowed for arming, the time of marching, the number of combatants, the day and place of the battle; all with such impartiality that neither army has a single man more than the other. On each side the maimed soldiers are enrolled in one company and on the day of battle the Generals are careful to send them against the maimed soldiers on the other side. The giants are opposed by the colossi, the fencers by the nimble, the valiant by the courageous, the weak by the feeble, the unhealthy by the sick, the robust by the strong; and if someone should strike any but his prescribed enemy he is found guilty of cowardice unless he can clear himself by showing it was a mistake. After the battle they count the wounded, the dead and the prisoners, for none is ever seen to run away. If the losses are equal on each side they draw lots as to who shall be proclaimed the victor. But although a King may have defeated his enemy in open war he has achieved little; there are other less numerous armies of men of wit and learning, upon whose disputes depends wholly the real triumph or servitude of States. A man of learning is opposed to another, men of wit and judgment are set against their like; and the triumph gained by a State in this way is considered equal to three victories of brute force. When a nation is proclaimed victorious, they break up the assembly and the conquering people chooses for its King either their own or that of their enemies."
I could not forbear laughing at this scrupulous manner of making war and as an example of a far stronger policy I alleged the customs of our Europe, where the Monarch takes care to omit no opportunity of conquest; and she answered me in this way:
"Tell me", said she, "do your Princes justify their arms by anything save the right of force?"
"Yes indeed", replied I, "with the justice of their cause."
"Why then", she continued, "do not they choose arbitrators above suspicion to reconcile them? And if there is as much right on the one side as on the other let them stay as they were or let them play a hundred up at piquet for the Town or Province about which they are disputing. And yet, while they are the cause that more than four millions of better men than themselves get broken heads, they are in their cabinets joking over the circumstances of the massacre of these poor boobies. But I am wrong to blame the courage of your brave subjects; they do well to die for their country; 'tis an affair of importance, a matter of being the vassal of a King who wears a ruff or of a King who wears falling bands."
"But", I replied, "why all these circumstances in your manner of fighting? Is it not enough for armies to be equal in numbers?"
"Your judgment is all astray", she replied. "On your faith now, do you think that if you overcome your enemy in the field face to face, that you have beaten him in fair warfare if you wear mail and he does not? If he has only a dagger and you a rapier? Finally, if he is one-armed and you have both your arms? Yet with all the equality you recommend so much to your gladiators, they never fight on equal terms; one will be tall, another short; one skilful, the other will never have handled a sword; one will be strong, the other weak. And even if these proportions are equalised, if they are equally tall, equally nimble and equally strong, they will still not be on an equal footing, for one of the two will perhaps be more courageous than the other. And because a brutal fellow will not consider the peril, will be bilious and will have more blood, will have a heart more set with the qualities which make for courage (as if this were not an arm his enemy does not possess, just like a sword!), he will rush violently upon his adversary, terrify him and deprive of life a poor man who saw the danger, whose vital heat was stifled in phlegm and whose heart is too large to collect the spirits necessary to get rid of that ice we call poltroonery. So you praise a man for having killed his enemy when he had him at an advantage, and by praising his boldness you praise him for a sin against Nature, since boldness tends to its own destruction.[47]
"You must know that a few years ago a Remonstrance was sent up to the council of war, demanding a more circumspect and more conscientious regulation of combats. The philosopher who sent up the notice spoke in these words:
"'You imagine, gentlemen, that you have equalised two combatants when you have chosen them both hardy, both tall, both active, both courageous, but this still is not enough; the conqueror must win by skill, by force or by chance. If it were by skill, he has doubtless struck his adversary in a place he has not expected, or more quickly than seemed likely; or, feigning to attack him on one side, he paid him home on the other. This is finesse, deceiving, betraying. And such finesse, such deceit, such treason should not contribute to the fair fame of a true gentleman. If he has triumphed by force, will you consider his enemy beaten because he has been overwhelmed? No, doubtless; any more than you would say that a man had lost the victory if he should be overwhelmed by the fall of a mountain, since it was not in his power to gain it. Moreover he has not been overcome, because at that moment he was not disposed to be able to resist the violence of his adversary. And if he has beaten his enemy by chance, you should crown Fortune, not him, for he has contributed nothing; and the loser is no more to be blamed than a dice-player who sees eighteen thrown when he has cast seventeen.'"
It was admitted that he was right, but that it was impossible in all human probability to remedy it and that it was better to yield to one small inconvenience than to give way to a thousand of greater importance.
She did not say any more on that occasion, because she was afraid to be found alone with me at so early an hour. In that country unchastity is no crime; on the contrary, except for condemned criminals any man may take any woman, and similarly a woman may cite a man before the law-courts if he has refused her. But she dared not frequent me publicly, according to her own account, because at the last sacrifice the priests had declared that the women chiefly reported I was a man to hide under this pretext the execrable desire which burned them to mingle with beasts and to commit shamelessly sins against Nature with me. For this reason I remained a long time without seeing her or any of her sex.
Somebody must have re-lighted the quarrels about the definition of what I was, for just as I was resigned to die in my cage they came for me again to examine me. I was interrogated in the presence of a number of courtiers on several points in physics, but I do not think my responses were satisfactory; since the president of the court in a manner the reverse of dogmatic gave me at length his opinions on the structure of the world. They seemed to me ingenious and I should have found his philosophy much more reasonable than ours had he not gone back to the origin of the world, which he maintained was eternal. As soon as I heard him support a fantasy so contrary to what faith teaches us, I asked him what he could reply to the authority of Moses and that this great patriarch expressly declares that God created the world in six days. Instead of answering me the ignorant fellow only laughed. I could not prevent myself from saying then that since he took this attitude I began to think their world was only a Moon.
"But", said they all, "you see here earth, forests, rivers, seas; what is all that?"
"No matter", I replied, "Aristotle asserts that it is only the Moon; and if you had asserted the contrary in the classes where I made my studies, you would have been hissed."
At this there was a great shout of laughter. No need to ask whether it were the result of their ignorance! And I was taken back to my cage. The priests were told, however, that I had dared to say the Moon whence I came was a World and theirs was only a Moon. They believed this furnished them with a sufficient pretext for having me condemned to the water (which is their method of exterminating atheists); and with this purpose they went in a body to complain to the King, who promised them justice. It was ordered that I should be interrogated once more.
For the third time I was taken out of my cage and the Great Pontiff himself spoke against me. I do not remember his speech, because I was too frightened to receive the expressions of the voice without disorder and also because in declaiming he made use of an instrument whose noise deafened me; it was a trumpet which he had chosen on purpose so that the violence of its martial tone should heat up their minds for my death and by this emotion prevent reason from performing its office; as in our own armies, where the clamour of trumpets and drums prevents the soldier from reflecting on the importance of his life.
When he had spoken, I got up to defend my cause, but I was freed from this trouble by the occurrence you are about to hear. As I opened my mouth, a man who had forced his way with great difficulty through the crowd fell at the King's feet and for a long time lay on his back. This action did not surprise me; I had long known that they assumed this posture when they desired to discourse in public. I simply pocketed my speech and here is the one we had from him:
"Just judges, hear me! You cannot condemn this Man, this Monkey or this Parrot for having said that the Moon is a World whence he came. If he is a man; even though he did not come from the Moon, every man is free and is he not free to imagine what he wishes? What! Can you force him to have no fancies but yours? You may easily compel him to say he believes the Moon is not a World, nevertheless he will not believe it; for, in order to believe something, there must be presented to his imagination certain possibilities leaning rather to the Yes than to the No of this thing. So unless you furnish him with this probability or unless it spontaneously offers itself to his mind he may say he believes it, but for all that he will not believe it.
"I have now to prove to you that he should not be condemned if you put him in the category of beasts. Admitted that he is an animal without reason—then what reason have you yourselves to accuse him for having sinned against reason? He has said that the Moon is a World. Well, brute beasts act only by Nature's instinct; therefore it is Nature says it, not he. To believe that this wise Nature who made the Moon and this World does not know herself what it is, while you, who know nothing save what you get from her, should know it more certainly, would be very ridiculous. But even if passion should make you abandon your first principles and you should suppose that Nature does not direct animals, blush at least at the uneasiness caused you by the whimsies of a beast. Truly, gentlemen, if you met a man of ripe age who devoted himself to policing an ant-hill, giving a blow to one ant who had made his companion fall, imprisoning another for stealing a grain of corn from his neighbour, prosecuting another for abandoning its eggs, would you not consider such a man senseless to attend to things too much beneath him and to desire to subject to reason animals which do not use it? Venerable Pontiffs, what should you call the interest that you take in the whimsies of this little animal? Just judges, I have spoken."
As soon as he had finished a loud music of applause echoed through the hall; and after the opinions had been discussed for a long quarter of an hour, the King pronounced the following sentence:
"That henceforth I should be considered a man; as such set at liberty, and that the punishment of being drowned should be modified into making a 'shameful amends' (for there is no 'honourable amends' in that land), in which amends I should publicly disavow having taught that the Moon was a World, and this on account of the scandal the novelty of the opinion might have caused the souls of the weaker brethren."
When this sentence was pronounced I was taken out of the Palace. As a mark of ignominy I was dressed very magnificently; I was borne along on the seat of a superb chariot; and I was drawn by four Princes, who were attached to the pole and at every crossroads in the town I was obliged to declare as follows:
"People, I declare to you that this Moon is not a Moon, but a World; and that World is not a World but a Moon. For your priests think good that you should believe this."
After I had cried the same thing in the five principal squares of the city, I perceived my defender holding out his hand to help me to get down. I was vastly surprised to recognise him when I looked in his face, for he was my demon. We embraced each other for an hour.
"Come away home with me", said he, "for if you return to Court you will be frowned upon after a shameful amends. Moreover I must tell you that you would still be with the Monkeys, like your friend the Spaniard, if I had not published abroad the vigour and strength of your wit and secured in your favour the protection of the nobles against the prophets."
I had barely finished thanking him when we reached his lodging. Before our meal he told me of the wheels he had set in motion to force the priests to let me be heard, in spite of all the specious scruples with which they had wheedled the people's conscience. We sat before a large fire, because the weather was cold, and I think he was going on to tell me what he had done during the time I had not seen him, when they came to inform us that supper was ready.
"I have invited", he went on, "two professors from the academy of this town to eat with us this evening. I will bring them round to the subject of the philosophy taught in this world. You will also see my host's son. I have never met a young man so full of wit and he would be a second Socrates if he could regulate his knowledge and not stifle in vice the grace with which God continually visits him and cease to affect impiety out of mere ostentation. I have taken up my lodging here to find some occasion for instructing him."
He was silent as if to give me an opportunity of speaking in my turn; then he made a sign that they should divest me of the shameful ornaments with which I was still brilliant. Almost at the same time the two professors we were waiting for entered and we all four went off to the dining-room, where we found the young man he had spoken of already eating. They made him profound bows and treated him with a respect as deep as that of a slave for his lord. I asked my demon the reason of this, and he replied that it was on account of his age, because in that world the old render every deference and honour to the young. And more: the fathers obey their children, as soon as the latter have attained the age of reason in the opinion of the Senate of philosophers.
"You are surprised", he continued, "at a custom so contrary to that of your country? But there is nothing contrary to right reason in it for, tell me on your conscience, when a warm young fellow is most apt to imagine, to judge and to execute, is he not more capable of governing a family than an infirm man of sixty? The poor dullard, whose imagination is frozen by the snow of sixty winters, acts from the experience of fortunate successes, yet it was not he but his fortune which made them so, against all the rules and the whole management of human prudence.
"As to judgment he has just as little, although the common opinion of your world makes it a prerogative of old age. To remove this error, it must be known that what in an old man is called prudence is simply a panic apprehension, a mad fear of undertaking anything, which becomes an obsession. And so, my son, when he has not risked a danger by which a young man has been ruined, it was not because he foresaw the catastrophe but because he lacked fire to kindle those noble ardours which make us dare; and in that young man boldness was, as it were, a pledge of the success of his plan, because that spirit which gives promptitude and facility of execution is precisely that which urged him to undertake it.
"As to his carrying things out, I should be wronging your wit did I labour to convince it by proofs. You know that youth alone is fit for action; and if you are not fully persuaded of this, tell me, I beg you, when you respect a brave man is it not because he can avenge you upon your enemies or your oppressors? Why then should you still consider him such, except from habit, when a battalion of seventy Januaries has frozen his blood and killed with cold all the noble enthusiasms which inflame young persons in the cause of justice? When you defer to the strong man is it not in order that he may be obliged to you for a victory which you could not dispute? Why then should you submit to him, when idleness has melted his muscles, weakened his arteries, evaporated his spirits and sucked the marrow from his bones?
"If you adore a woman, is it not because of her beauty? Why then continue your genuflections when old age has made her a phantom menacing the living with death? In fine, when you honour a witty man it is because through the liveliness of his genius he grasps a tangled affair and unravels it, because he delights the most distinguished assembly with his talk, because he digests the sciences into a single thought, and a noble soul will never form a more violent desire than to resemble him; and yet you continue to pay homage to him when his outworn organs render his head imbecile and heavy and his silence in company makes him rather like the statue of a Household God than a man capable of reason. Resolve yourself, my son, it is better that young men should be given the control of families than old men. Certainly, you would be very weak to think that Hercules, Achilles, Epaminondas, Alexander and Caesar, who all died before they were forty, were persons to whom one would owe no more than ordinary courtesies, while bringing incense to a doting old fool simply because the Sun had ninety times looked upon his harvest.
"'But', you will say, 'all the laws of our world are careful to repeat this respect which we owe to the aged.' It is true. But all who introduced these laws were old men and they were afraid the young men would dispossess them of the authority they had usurped; and so, like the legislators of false religions, they made a mystery of what they could not prove.
"'Yes but,' you will say, 'this old man is my father and Heaven promises me a long life if I honour him.'
"My son, if your father commands nothing contrary to the inspirations of the Most High, I grant it. If not; tread upon the belly of the father who engendered you, stamp on the bosom of the mother who conceived you, for I see no likelihood that your supposing this cowardly respect wrenched from your weakness by vicious parents would be agreeable to Heaven will lengthen the thread of your life.
"What! That doffing your hat, which so tickles and nourishes your father's pride, will it break an abscess you have in your side, will it renew your radical moisture, will it cure a rapier wound in your stomach, will it disperse a stone in your bladder? If this is so, doctors are grievously wrong. Instead of the infernal potions with which they poison men's lives, let them prescribe for smallpox with 'three congees fasting', four 'humble thanks' after dinner and twelve 'good night, father and mother', before going to bed. You will retort that without him you would not be at all. It is true, but he himself would never have been without your grandfather, nor your grandfather without your great-grandfather, and without you your father could not have a grandson. When Nature brought him forth it was on condition that he should return that which she lent him; so when he begot you he gave you nothing, he merely paid a debt! Moreover I should very much like to know if your parents were thinking of you when they begot you? Alas, not at all! And yet you think yourself obliged to them for a present they made you without thinking!
"What, because your father was so lascivious he could not resist the charms of some baggage, because he made a bargain to satisfy his desire and you were the masonry which resulted from their puddling, you are to revere this sensual fellow as one of the seven wise men of Greece? What, because a miser purchased the rich goods of his wife by means of a child, must that child only speak to him on its knees? In this way your father acted well when he was bawdy and the other when he drove a hard bargain, for otherwise neither of you children would ever have been; but I should like to know whether he would not have pulled the trigger just the same, if he had been certain that his pistol would miss fire? Good God! What the people in your world can be made to believe.
"My son, your body alone comes from your mortal architect, your soul came from Heaven and might just as well have been sheathed in some other scabbard. Your father might have been born your son as you were born his. How do you know even that he did not prevent you from inheriting a crown? Perhaps your spirit set out from Heaven with the purpose of animating the King of the Romans in the Empress's womb; on the way it chanced to meet your embryo and to shorten the journey took up its abode there. No, no, God would not have blotted you from the sum He had made of men if your father had died as a little boy. But who knows whether you might not have been to-day the work of some valiant captain who would have shared with you his glory as well as his goods! So you are perhaps no more beholden to your father for the life he gave you than you would be to a pirate who had put you in irons because he fed you. And suppose he had begotten you a King—a present loses its merit when it is made without consulting the person who receives it. Caesar was given death; it was given likewise to Cassius; but Cassius was under an obligation to the slave from whom he obtained it, but not Caesar to his murderers because they forced him to take it. When your father embraced your mother did he consult your wishes? Did he ask you if you thought it good to see this century or to wait for another? If you were content to be the son of a fool or if you had the ambition to proceed from an honest man? Alas! in a matter which concerned you alone, you were the only person whose opinion was not consulted! Perhaps if you had then been enclosed somewhere in the womb of Nature's ideas and it had been in your power to control your birth, you might have said to Fate: 'My dear lady, take someone else's life spindle. I have been in nothingness for a very long time and I prefer to remain another hundred years without existing than to exist to-day and to repent it to-morrow.' However you had to endure it; you might whimper as you would to return to the long black house from which you had been torn, they simply pretended to think you were asking to suckle.
"My son, these are approximately the reasons for the respect which fathers give their children. I know I have leaned to the children's side more than justice asks and that I have argued in their favour a little against my conscience. But I desired to correct that insolent pride with which fathers insult over the weakness of their offspring, and therefore I was obliged to act like those who straighten a crooked tree; they pull it to the other side so that between the two twistings it grows straight again. In the same way I have made the fathers pay that tyrannical deference they had usurped from others and I took from them much which is due them, so that hereafter they should be content with what they really deserve. I know my apology will have shocked all old men, but let them remember that they were sons before they were fathers and that I must have spoken to their advantage too, since they were not found under a gooseberry bush. But whatever happens, even if my enemies attack me, I shall be safe because I have served all men and injured only half of them."
With these words he ceased speaking and our host's son began as follows:
"Permit me", said he, "since by your care I am informed of the Origin, History, Customs and Philosophy of this little man's world, to add something to what you have said and to prove that children are under no obligation to their fathers for being begotten because their fathers were conscientiously obliged to beget them.
"The narrowest Philosophy of their world admits that it is more desirable to die than not to have been, because one must have lived in order to die. Well, if I do not give being to this nothing, I place it in a worse state than death, and in not producing it I am more guilty than if I killed it. You would think, my little man, you had committed an unpardonable parricide if you had throttled your son. Truly, it would be an enormity; however it is more execrable not to give being to that which could receive it, for the child you deprive of light has nevertheless had the satisfaction of enjoying it a certain time. Moreover we know that it is only deprived of light for a few centuries; but there are forty poor little nothings, which you might make into forty good soldiers for your King, and you maliciously prevent them from seeing the daylight, letting them grow corrupt in your loins at the risk of being stifled by an apoplexy.
"Do not answer me with panegyrics of virginity. This virtue is only a smoke, for all the respect with which it is commonly idolised is, even among you, merely an advice, not to kill, but to refrain from making, one's son; and hence to make him more unfortunate than a dead man. It is a commandment; but since in the world whence you come chastity is considered so preferable to carnal propagation I marvel that God did not cause you to be born like mushrooms from the dew of May, or, at least, like crocodiles from thick mud heated by the sun. Yet it is only by accident that He sends eunuchs among you and He does not tear the genitals from your monks, your priests or your cardinals. You will say these were bestowed on them by Nature. Yes, but He is Nature's Master and if He had recognised that this piece was harmful to their salvation He would have ordered them to cut it off, as by the old law He commanded the Jews to cut off their foreskins. But these fancies are too ridiculous. On your honour, is there any part of your body more sacred or more profane than another? Why should I be a sin when I touch my centre-piece and not when I touch my ear or my heel? Is it because there is a tickling sensation? Why then I should not purge myself in the privy, for that cannot be done without some sort of pleasure; and pious men should not raise themselves to the contemplation of God, since thereby they enjoy a great pleasure in the imagination. Truly, seeing how much the religion of your country is contrary to Nature and how jealous it is of man's enjoyments, I am surprised your priests have not made it a crime to scratch oneself, on account of the agreeable sensation one feels from it. On the other hand I have noticed that far-seeing Nature has made all great, valiant and witty persons lean towards the delicate pleasures of love, as, for example, Samson, David, Hercules, Caesar, Hannibal and Charlemagne. Was this done for them to reap this organ of pleasure with a blow from a sickle? Alas, even in a tub Nature found out and debauched Diogenes, thin, ugly, and lousy; and forced him to make the breath that cooled his carrots into sighs for Lais. Doubtless Nature acted in this way for fear lest honest men should cease in the world. Let us conclude from this that your father was conscientiously obliged to set you free to the light and, when he imagines you are greatly obliged to him for his having made you by tickling himself, he actually has only given you what an ordinary bull gives his calves ten times every day for his amusement."
"You are wrong", interrupted my demon, "to try to regulate God's wisdom. It is true that He has forbidden us excess in this pleasure, but how do you know that He has not so willed it in order that the difficulties we find in compassing this passion may fit us for the glory He is preparing for us? How do you know that it was not to sharpen appetite by forbidding it? How do you know that He did not foresee that if youth gave itself up to the impetuosities of the flesh, too frequent enjoyment would enfeeble their seed and bring about the end of the world at the grandsons of the first man? How do you know He did not wish to prevent too many hungry generations from finding the fertility of the earth insufficient for their needs? Finally, how do you know He has not willed to act against all appearance of reason in order to reward fully those who have believed in His word against all appearance of reason?"
It seemed to me that this reply did not satisfy our young host, for he shook his head two or three times; but our mutual instructor was silent, because the meal was about to be carried in. We stretched ourselves out upon very soft mattresses covered with wide embroideries, where the vapours came to us as they had done before at the inn. A young servant took the elder of our two philosophers and led him into another little room. "Come back to us here", cried my instructor, "as soon as you have eaten." He promised to do so.
This fantasy of eating alone gave me the curiosity to ask the reason.
"He does not taste", said he, "the odour of meat or even of herbs unless they have died naturally, because he thinks them capable of pain."
"I am not greatly surprised", I replied, "that he should abstain from flesh and everything which has a sensitive life. In our world the Pythagoreans and even certain holy Anchorites observed this regime. But it seems to me altogether ridiculous not to cut a cabbage, for example, for fear of hurting it."
"For my part", replied my demon, "I see a good deal of probability in his opinion. Is not the cabbage you speak of as much a creation of God as yourself? Have you not both equally God and want for father and mother? Has not God's intellect been occupied from all eternity with its birth as well as yours? Moreover it seems He has provided more necessarily for the birth of vegetable than of reasonable life, since He has committed the generation of man to the caprice of his father, who can beget or not beget at his pleasure. But God has not treated the cabbage with such rigour, for He seems to have been more concerned lest the race of cabbages should perish than the race of men, and instead of permitting the father the option of begetting the son He forces them willy-nilly to give birth to others. And while men can at most beget a score in their lifetime, cabbages produce four hundred thousand a head. And to say that God loves man more than a cabbage is to tickle ourselves to make ourselves laugh; He is incapable of passion and therefore cannot love or hate anybody; and if He were capable of love He would rather feel tenderness for the cabbage you are holding (which cannot offend Him) than for a man when He already has before His eyes the wrongs the man is fated to commit. Add to this that a man cannot be born without sin, for he is a part of the first man who rendered him guilty, but we know very well that the first cabbage did not offend its Creator in the Earthly Paradise. Will it be said that we are made in the image of the Sovereign Being and that cabbages are not? Suppose that were true, by polluting in ourselves the soul whereby we resembled Him we have effaced the resemblance, for nothing is more contrary to God than sin. Then if our soul is no longer His portrait, we no more resemble Him through our hands, our feet, our mouth, our forehead and ears than a cabbage through its leaves, its flowers, its stalk, its heart and its head. If this poor plant could speak when you cut it do you not think it would say:
"'Man, my dear brother, what have I done to you to merit death? I grow only in your gardens, I am never found in wild places where I should live safely; I scorn to be the work of any hands but yours and I have scarcely left them when I lift myself from the ground to return to them. I spread out, I hold out my arms to you, I offer you the seeds my children, and to reward my courtesy you have my head cut off!'
"This is what a cabbage would say if it could express itself, and, because it cannot complain, does that mean that we have the right to do it all the ill it cannot prevent? If I find a wretch in fetters am I guiltless if I kill him, merely because he cannot defend himself? On the contrary, my cruelty is rendered worse by his weakness; however poor, however lacking in all advantages this hapless cabbage may be, it does not merit death on that account. What! Of all the goods of life it has none but that of vegetating and we deprive it of this? The sin of murdering a man is not so great as to cut a cabbage and to deprive it of life, because one day the man will live again while the cabbage has no other life to hope for. By killing a cabbage you annihilate its soul; but by killing a man you simply make him change his domicile. And I go further. Since God, the common Father of all things, cherishes equally all His works, is it not reasonable that He should have shared His benefits equally between us and plants? True, we were born first, but in God's family there is no right of primogeniture. If then cabbages did not share with us the fief of immortality, doubtless they received some other advantage, the briefness of whose existence is compensated for by its grandeur. This may be an universal intellect, a perfect knowledge of all things in their causes; for this reason it may be that the wise Contriver did not fashion them organs like ours, whose effect is only a simple, weak and often deceitful reasoning, but gave them organs that are stronger, more numerous and more skilfully elaborated to serve the purposes of their speculative conversations? Perhaps you will ask me why they have never communicated these great thoughts to us? But tell me, have you ever been taught by the Angels any more than by them? Since there is no proportion, no relation and no harmony between man's imbecile faculties and those of these divine creatures, these intellectual cabbages may try their best to make us understand the hidden cause of all miraculous events, we still lack senses capable of perceiving these fine points.
"Moses, the greatest of all philosophers, since according to what you say he gathered his knowledge of Nature from the source of Nature itself, indicated this truth when he spoke of the Tree of Knowledge. Under this enigma he wished to teach us that plants possess perfect philosophy. Remember then, O proudest of all animals, that although the cabbage you cut says not a word, it thinks none the less. The poor vegetable has no organs like ours to howl, to wriggle and to weep, but it has others to complain of the trick we play upon it, to draw down upon us the vengeance of Heaven. And if you ask me how I know that cabbages have these fine thoughts I ask you how you know that they do not have them? And how do you know that they do not say at night when they close up, in imitation of you: 'Master Curly-cabbage, I am your most humble servant, Savoy-Cabbage.'"
He was at this point of his discourse when the young man who had carried off our philosopher brought him back. "What! Already dined?" exclaimed my demon. He answered that he had, except for dessert, as the Physionome had permitted him to taste ours. Our young host did not wait for me to ask him the explanation of this mystery.
"I perceive", said he, "that this manner of living astonishes you. Know then that although health is regulated more carelessly in your world, the regime in this is not to be scorned. In every house there is a Physionome supported by the state who is approximately what would be called with you a doctor, except that he only treats healthy people and that he decides upon the different methods of treating us from the proportion, shape and symmetry of our limbs, from the features of the face, the colour of the flesh, the delicacy of the skin, the agility of the whole body, the sound of the voice, the complexion, the strength and hardness of the hair. Did you not notice just now a rather short man who gazed at you so long? He was the Physionome of this house. Be sure that he has varied the fumes of your dinner according to his observation of your appearance. Notice how far from our beds he placed the mattress for you to lie on. No doubt he decided your constitution was very different from ours, since he was afraid the odour which flows from these little taps under your nose should spread to us or that ours should smoke in your direction. To-night you will see he chooses the flowers for your bed with the same precautions."
While he was speaking I signed to my host to try to bring these philosophers on to speaking about some part of the science which they professed. He was too much my friend not to create an opportunity at once. I will not tell you the talk or the requests which were the ambassador to this treaty, the transition from the ridiculous to the serious was too imperceptible to be imitated. The last-comer of these doctors, after touching on other matters continued thus:
"It remains for me to prove to you that there are infinite worlds in an infinite world. Conceive, then, the Universe as a large animal, the stars (which are Worlds) as other animals within it, which in turn serve as worlds to other creatures, like ourselves, horses and elephants; in our turn we are also the worlds of certain yet smaller creatures, like boils, lice, worms, and mites. And these are the earth of other imperceptibles, just as we appear a great world to these little things. Perhaps our flesh, our blood and our vital principles are nothing but a texture of little animals holding together, lending us movement from their own and blindly allowing our will to drive them like a coachman, yet drive us too and all together produce that action we call life. Tell me, I beseech you, is it very hard to believe that a louse takes your body for a World, and that when one of them has travelled from one of your ears to the other, his companions should say of him that he has been to the ends of the world or that he has passed from one pole to the other? Yes, no doubt this little nation takes your hair for the forests of its country, the pores full of moisture for fountains, pimples for lakes and ponds, abscesses for seas, fluxions for deluges; and when you comb your hair backwards and forwards they take this movement for the ebb and flow of the ocean. Does not itching prove what I say? Is the mite which produces it anything but one of these little animals which has detached itself from civil society to set itself up as a tyrant in its country? If you ask me how it is that they are larger than other little imperceptibles, I ask you why elephants are larger than we are, and Irishmen than Spaniards? As to the breaking-out and the scabs, whose cause you do not know, they must happen either from the corruption of the bodies of enemies massacred by these little giants, or because the plague produced by the scarcity of food which these rebels have devoured has left heaps of bodies decaying in the country, or because the tyrant, having driven away from him his companions, whose bodies stopped up the pores of our body, has thus opened a passage to the moisture which has become corrupted by extravasation from the sphere of the circulation of our blood. Perhaps you will ask me why one mite produces a hundred others. That is not difficult to understand, for, as one revolt awakens another, so each of these little creatures, urged by the bad example of their rebellious companions, aspires to rule, and kindles everywhere war, slaughter and famine. But, you will say, some persons are much less subject to itch than others, yet each of us is equally filled with these animals if, as you declare, they make life. It is true, as we perceive, that phlegmatic subjects are less liable to the itch than those of a bilious temperament, because this people sympathises with the climate it inhabits and is more sluggish in a cold body than another which is heated by the temperature of its region, ferments, moves about and cannot remain in one place. Thus, a bilious man is more delicate than a phlegmatic, because he is stimulated in many more parts, and as the soul is only the action of these little beasts, he is able to feel in every place where these cattle are moving, while the phlegmatic is only hot enough to make them act in a few places. And to prove this universal mitedom you have only to consider how the blood flows to a gash when you are wounded. Your doctors say that it is guided by far-seeing Nature, who wishes to succour damaged parts. But this is chimerical. For there would have to be besides Soul and Spirit a third intellectual substance in us with its own functions and organs. It is much more probable that these little animals, feeling themselves attacked, send to their neighbours for help; they pour in from all sides: the country cannot contain so many people, and so they die stifled in the throng, or of hunger. This mortality happens when the abscess is ripe. To show that these animals of life are then extinguished, notice that corrupted flesh becomes insensible; and if cupping, which is ordered for the purpose of averting the fluxion, is successful, the reason is that these little animals have had heavy casualties in trying to close this opening, and therefore refuse to assist their allies, having only a mean strength to defend themselves."
He ceased speaking and when the second philosopher perceived our eyes were directed upon his and were urging him to speak in his turn, he said:
"Men, I see you are anxious to teach this little animal, who resembles us, something of the science we profess. I am at present dictating a treatise which I should be very glad to show him because of the light it throws upon the understanding of our physics. It is an explanation of the eternal origin of the world, but I am in a hurry to work my bellows; for to-morrow without fail the Town moves off. You will excuse me this time if I promise that as soon as the Town arrives at its destination, I will satisfy you."
At these words the host's son called for his father, and when he came the company asked him the time; the goodman answered that it was eight o'clock. His son then said in a rage:
"Hey! Come hither, varlet, did I not order you to warn us at seven? You know that the houses are going to-morrow, that the walls have already left, and yet your idleness even locks up your mouth."
"Sir", replied the goodman, "it has just been announced, while you were at table, that it is strictly forbidden to start until after to-morrow."
"No matter", replied he, lending him a buffet, "you should obey blindly, not try to understand my orders, but simply remember what I have bidden you. Quick, go and get your effigy."
When he had brought it, the young man seized it by the arm and whipped it for a long quarter of an hour.
"Now, rascal", he continued, "as a punishment for your disobedience you shall be a laughing stock to everybody for the rest of the day and so I order you to walk on two feet only all day."
The poor old man went out very mournfully and his son continued: "Gentlemen, I beseech you to excuse the rogueries of this hot-head. I hoped to make something good of him, but he takes advantage of my kindness. For my part I think the rogue will be the death of me; indeed on more than ten occasions I have been on the point of giving him my malediction."
Although I bit my lips I had great difficulty to keep myself from laughing at this world upside down. To break off this burlesque pedagogy, which no doubt would have made me burst forth in the end, I begged him to tell me what he meant by the journey of the Town he had just spoken of, whether the houses and the walls could move. He replied:
"My dear friend, our cities are divided into the mobile and the sedentary. The mobile, like that in which we are now, are constructed as follows: the architect builds each palace, as you see, of very light wood and inserts four wheels underneath it. In the thickness of one of the walls he places large and numerous bellows, whose nozzles pass in a horizontal line through the upper story from one gable to the other. When it is desired to move the town somewhere (for we change our air at every season), each one hangs out a number of large sails from one side of his house in front of the bellows; then he winds up a spring to make them play and in less than eight days the continuous blasts vomited by these windy monsters against the sails carry their houses, if they wish, more than a hundred leagues.
"The architecture of the second kind, which we call sedentary, is as follows: the houses are almost like your towers, except that they are made of wood and that in the middle they have a large strong screw which goes from the cellar to the roof to raise or lower them at will. Well, the earth underneath is hollowed out as deep as the building is high, and the whole thing is constructed in this manner so that when the frosts begin to fall cold from the sky, they can lower their houses to the bottom of the hole by turning them; and then they cover the tower and the hollow part about it with large skins and so shelter themselves from the inclemency of the air. But as soon as the soft breath of Spring makes the air milder, they return to the daylight by means of the large screw of which I spoke."
I think he wished to stop speaking there, but I began thus:
"Faith, sir, I should never have thought so expert a mason could be a philosopher, did I not have you as witness. For this reason, since we are not going to-day, you will have plenty of leisure to explain to us this eternal origin of the world with which you entertained us just now. In recompense, I promise you that as soon as I return to the Moon, whence my instructor"—I pointed to my demon—"will prove to you that I came, I will disseminate your fame by relating the fine things you tell me. I see that you laugh at this promise, because you do not believe the Moon is a world and still less that I am one of its inhabitants. But I can assure you that the people of that World take this one for a Moon and will laugh at me when I say their Moon is a World, that it has fields and inhabitants."
He only replied by a smile, and then he began to speak as follows:
"When we try to go back to the origin of this Great All we are forced to run into three or four absurdities, and so it is reasonable to take the path which makes us stumble least. The first obstacle that stops us is the Eternity of the World. Men's minds are not strong enough to conceive it and, because they are not able to imagine that so vast, so beautiful, so well regulated an Universe could have made itself, they take refuge in Creation. But, like one who plunges into a river for fear of being wet with rain, they run from the arms of a dwarf to the pity of a giant; and they do not even escape the difficulty, for they give to God the eternity they took from the world because they could not understand it. As if it were easier to imagine it in the one than in the other! This absurdity, then, or this giant of which I spoke, is Creation; for, tell me truly, has it ever been conceived how something could be made from nothing? Alas! There are such infinite differences between Nothing and one single atom that the acutest brain could not penetrate them. To escape this inexplicable labyrinth you must admit a Matter co-eternal with God, and then it is unnecessary to admit a God, since the World could have existed without Him. But, you will say, even if I grant you this Eternal Matter, how did this chaos become order of itself? Well, I shall explain it to you.
"My little Animal, after you have mentally separated each little visible body into an infinity of little invisible bodies, you are to imagine that the infinite Universe is composed of nothing but these infinite atoms which are very solid, very incorruptible, and very simple. Some are cubes, some parallelograms, some angular, some round, some pointed, some pyramidal, some hexagonal, some oval, and all act differently according to their shape. And to prove this, place a very round ivory ball upon a very smooth surface; and at the slightest movement you give it, it will be a half-quarter of an hour before it stops; to which I add that if it were as perfectly round as some of the atoms of which I speak, it would never stop. Then if art is capable of inclining a body to perpetual motion, why should we not believe that Nature can do it? It is the same with other shapes; one, like the square, demands perpetual rest; others, a movement sideways; others, a half-movement like palpitation. When the round, whose nature is to move, joins with the pyramidal, it perhaps makes what we call fire, because fire not only moves without resting but pierces and penetrates easily. Moreover, fire produces different effects according to the size and quantity of the angles where the round shape is joined; the fire of pepper is different from the fire of sugar, the fire of sugar from that of cinnamon, the fire of cinnamon from that of cloves, and this in turn from the fire of a faggot. Well then, fire, which is the constructor and destructor of the parts and of the whole of the Universe, gathers into an oak the quantity of shapes necessary for the composition of that oak. But, you will say, how could mere chance collect in one place all the things necessary to produce this oak? I reply that it is not extraordinary that matter so placed should make an oak, but it would have been very much more marvellous if an oak had not been formed when matter was thus disposed. Had there been a little less of certain shapes, it would have been an elm, a poplar, a willow, an elder-tree, heather or moss; a little more of certain other shapes and it would have been a sensitive plant, an oyster in a shell, a worm, a fly, a frog, a sparrow, a monkey, a man. When you throw three dice on the table and they all turn up twos; or three, four, five; or two sixes and a one; do you say: 'What a miracle! each die has turned up the same number, when so many other numbers might be turned up; what a miracle! Three dice have turned up three successive numbers; what a miracle! Two sixes and the opposite of the other six has turned up!' I am certain that a man of wit like you would not make these exclamations, for since there are only a certain quantity of numbers on the dice, it is impossible but that one of them should turn up. You are surprised that this matter, mixed up pell-mell by chance, should have built up a man, since so many things are necessary to the construction of his being. But you do not know that this matter, moving towards the design of a man, has stopped a hundred million times on the way to form sometimes a stone, sometimes lead, sometimes coral, sometimes a flower, sometimes a comet, according to the excess or deficiency of certain shapes necessary or unnecessary to compose a man. It is not marvellous that an infinite quantity of matter changing and moving continually should have met together to make the few animals, vegetables and minerals which we see, any more than it is marvellous for a royal pair to turn up in a hundred throws of the dice; and it is impossible but that something should be made from this movement. This thing will always be wondered at by a scatterbrain who will not comprehend how nearly it was not made at all. When the large river
turns a mill, moves the works of a clock, and the little rivulet
does nothing but run and sometimes overflow, you will not say the river has intelligence, because you know it has met with things so placed as to cause all these masterpieces. If a mill had not been placed in its path, it would not have ground the corn; if it had not met the clock it would not have marked the hours; and if the rivulet I spoke of had met the same things it would have performed the same miracles. It is the same with fire, which moves by itself; for when it found organs proper for the agitation necessary to reason, it reasoned; when it found those proper to feel only, it felt; when it found those proper to vegetation, it vegetated. And to prove this, tear out the eyes of a man who is enabled to see by this fire or this soul, and he will cease to see, just as our river will not mark the hours if the clock is destroyed.
"In fine, these first and indivisible atoms make a circle upon which the most embarrassing difficulties of physics roll without difficulty. Even the operation of the senses, which nobody yet has been able to understand, I explain very easily with these little bodies. Let us begin with sight, which, as the most incomprehensible, deserves our first attention. As I suppose, the coverings of the eye, whose openings are like those of glass, transmit the fire-dust we call visual rays, which is stopped by some opaque matter making it rebound; for this fire-dust meets on the way the image of the object which repulses it and, as this image is simply an infinite number of little bodies continually thrown off in equal superficies from the subject looked at, the image thrusts back the rays to our eyes.
"You will not fail to object to me that glass is an opaque and closely-packed body; yet instead of throwing back these other little bodies it allows them to pierce it. But I reply that the pores of glass are made in the same shape as these atoms of fire which pass through it; and just as a wheat-sieve is not fit to sift oats, nor an oat-sieve to sift wheat, so a deal box thin enough to transmit sound is not penetrable by sight and a piece of transparent crystal which allows itself to be pierced by sight is not penetrable by hearing."
I could not prevent myself from interrupting: "But how do you explain by these principles, sir, the fact that we are reflected in a mirror?"
"It is very easy", he replied, "you must suppose that the rays of our eyes pass through the glass and meet behind it a non-diaphanous body which casts them off; they return the way they came and they find spread out upon the mirror the little bodies that move in equal superficies from our own and carry them back to our eyes. Our imagination, which is hotter than the other faculties of the soul, attracts the most subtle of them, with which it makes a reduced portrait.
"The operation of hearing is no more difficult to understand. To be more succinct, let us consider it only in harmony. Suppose then a lute touched by the hands of a master of the art. You will ask me how it happens that I perceive a thing I do not see, so far from me? Do sponges go out of my ears to suck up this music and bring it to me? Or does this lute player beget in my head another little player with another little lute, who has been ordered to sing me the same airs? No. This miracle is caused by the vibrating chord striking the little bodies which compose the air and so driving them into my brain and gently piercing it with these little corporeal nothings. When the string is stretched, the sound is high, because it drives the atoms more vigorously; and the organ so penetrated gives the fantasy sufficient of them to make its picture. If there is not enough, our memory does not complete its image and we are forced to repeat the same sound to it, so that for example it may take from the materials given it by the strains of a saraband enough to complete the portrait of that saraband. But this operation is almost nothing. The wonderful thing is that by this means we are moved sometimes to joy, sometimes to rage, sometimes to pity, sometimes to reflection, sometimes to pain. This happens, I imagine, when the movement received by these little bodies meets within us other little bodies moving in the same way or, on account of their shape, capable of the same motion. The new-comers excite their hosts to move with them and so, when a violent tune meets the fire of our blood (which is disposed to the same movement) it incites this fire to thrust its way out. This is what we call the ardour of courage. If a sound is gentler and has only strength enough to raise a slighter, more wavering flame (because the matter is more volatile), it moves along the nerves, membranes and channels of our flesh and excites the tickling we call joy. The ebullition of the other passions happens in the same way according to whether the little bodies are thrown against us more or less violently, whether they receive movement by meeting other vibrations, and according to what they find to move within us.
"The demonstration of touch is not more difficult. There is a perpetual emission of little bodies from all palpable matter; the more we touch it the more they are evaporated, because we squeeze them out of the object we handle like water from a sponge when we compress it. Hard bodies report to the organ their solidity; supple bodies, their softness; the rough, their harshness; the burning, their heat; the frozen, their cold. And as a proof of this, observe that hands hardened by labour are not so sensitive in discerning by the touch, and this is because of the thickness of the callus, which is neither porous nor animated and therefore transmits with great difficulty these fumes of matter. Some will desire to know where the organ of touch resides. For my part, I think it extends over all the superficies of our mass, since it happens through the agency of our nerves; and our skin is merely an imperceptible and continuous texture of nerves. I imagine, however, that the nearer to the head the limb with which we touch, the sooner we perceive. You may make the experiment as follows: if we close our eyes and touch something with the hand we discover what it is immediately, but if on the contrary we touch it with the foot we are some time in finding out what it is. The reason for this is that our nerves, whose matter is no more compact than that of our skin (which is everywhere pitted with little holes), lose many of these little atoms on the way through the small channels of their texture before the atoms reach the brain, the end of their journey.
"It remains for me to prove that smell and taste are caused also by the agency of these same little bodies. Tell me, then, when I taste a fruit, is it not through the moisture of my mouth melting it? Admit then that since there are different salts in a pear, which by being dissolved are split up into little bodies differing in shape from those making the taste of a plum, they must pierce our palate in a different way; just as the gash made by a pike piercing me is unlike that which I endure from a pistol-bullet, and as a pistol-bullet causes me a pain different from that of a steel arrow-head.
"I have nothing to say about smell, since even your philosophers admit that it takes place through a continual emission of little bodies cast off from their mass which strike our noses as they pass.
"On this principle I will now explain to you the creation, the harmony and the influence of the celestial globes with the immutable variety of meteors."
He was about to continue when our old host entered and turned our philosopher's thoughts toward departure. He brought with him crystals filled with glow-worms to lighten the room, but these little fire-insects lose much of their light when they are not freshly gathered and as these were ten days old they hardly shone at all. My demon did not wait for the company to be inconvenienced by this; he went up to his room and returned immediately with two fire balls, so brilliant that we were all surprised he did not burn his fingers.
"These incombustible torches", said he, "will serve us better than your clusters of worms. They are sun-rays which I have purged of their heat; otherwise the corrosive qualities of its fire would have dazzled and hurt your sight. I have extracted the light and shut it in these transparent balls I am holding. This should not be a matter of great surprise to you; I was born in the Sun and so it is no more difficult for me to condense the rays which are the dust of that world than for you to collect the dust or atoms which are the pulverised earth of this world."
When we had finished praising this child of the Sun, it was late, and the young host sent his father home with the two philosophers, with a dozen balls of glow-worms hanging from his four legs. The rest of us, that is to say, the young host, my Instructor and I, went to bed by order of the Physionome. This time he put me in a room of violets and lilies and had me tickled in the usual way to send me to sleep. The next morning about nine o'clock my demon came in and told me he had just returned from the palace, whence he had been sent for by
, one of the Queen's waiting-women. She had inquired after me and said she still persisted in keeping her word, which is to say that she would gladly follow me if I would take her with me to the other World.
"I was greatly edified", he continued, "when I found that the principal motive for her journey was directed towards making herself a Christian. I have promised to help her design with all my ability and for this purpose to invent a machine capable of holding three or four persons, in which you can rise up together. From to-day onwards I shall apply myself seriously to the execution of this project. To amuse you during my absence here is a book which I brought from my native land. It is called A Voyage to the Sun. I am also giving you another, which I rate more highly, the Great Works of the Philosophers, composed by one of the greatest Wits of the Sun. He proves in it that all things are true and shows the way to unite physically the truths of each contradiction; for example, that white is black and black is white, that you can be and not be at the same time, that there can be a mountain without a valley, that nothing is something and that all things which exist do not exist. But notice that he proves these unheard-of paradoxes without any sophistry or captious reasoning. When you are tired of reading you can take a walk or converse with your companion, our young host. His mind has many charms; but what displeases me in him is his impiety. If he scandalizes you or shakes your faith by his reasoning do not fail to come at once and tell them to me; I will resolve the difficulties for you. Another would tell you to leave his company directly he began to philosophize on these matters, but he is extremely vain and I am certain he would take your flight for a defeat and would imagine your belief to be contrary to reason if you refused to listen to his reasons. Remember to live free."
With this phrase he left me, for in that country it is the method of leave-taking; and, in the same way, "Good day," or "Your servant, sir", is expressed by the compliment: "Sage, love me, since I love you."
He had scarcely left me when I began to examine attentively my books. The boxes, that is to say their covers, seemed to me admirable for their richness; one was carved from a single diamond incomparably more brilliant than ours, the second appeared to be a monstrous pearl cleft in two. My demon had translated these books into the language of that world; but as I have not yet spoken of their printing, I will explain the construction of these two volumes.
At the opening of the box I found something in metal almost similar to our clocks, filled with an infinite number of little springs and imperceptible machines. It is a book indeed, but a miraculous book without pages or letters; in fine, it is a book to learn from which eyes are useless, only ears are needed. When someone wishes to read he winds up the machine with a large number of all sorts of keys; then he turns the pointer towards the chapter he wishes to hear, and immediately, as if from a man's mouth or a musical instrument, this machine gives out all the distinct and different sounds which serve as the expression of speech between the noble Moon-dwellers.[48]
When I had reflected on this miraculous invention in book-making I was no longer surprised that the young men of that country possessed more knowledge at sixteen or eighteen than grey-beards in our World. Since they know how to read as soon as they speak, they are never without reading. Indoors, out of doors, in town, travelling, on foot, or on horseback, they can have in their pocket or hanging from their saddle-bows as many as thirty of these books, and they have only to wind up a spring to hear a chapter, or several chapters, if they are in the mood to hear a whole book. In this way you have continually about you all great men, living or dead, and you hear them viva voce.
This present occupied me for more than an hour, and then hanging them upon myself like earrings I went out to walk in the town. I had not passed out of the street which ran opposite our house when towards the other end I met a large number of mournful people. Four of them carried on their shoulders a sort of coffin wrapped in black. I asked a bystander what was the meaning of this procession so similar to a funeral in my own country. He replied that the wicked
, whose name was expressed among the people by a blow on the right knee, had been convicted of envy and ingratitude: yesterday he had died and the Parliament had condemned him more than twenty years ago to die a natural death in his bed and to be buried after his death. I began to laugh at this reply and he asked me: "Why?"
"You surprise me", I replied, "by telling me that a long life, a peaceful death and a pompous burial which in our World are signs of benediction, serve in this as an exemplary punishment."
"What! You consider burial a mark of benediction?" retorted this man. "On your honour now, can you conceive anything more terrible than a corpse moving under swarms of worms, at the mercy of toads which gnaw its cheeks; in fine, the plague dressed in a man's body. Good God! The mere thought that even when dead my face should be wrapped in a cloth and I should have five feet of earth on my mouth makes it difficult for me to breathe! That wretch you see carried there, in addition to the infamy of being cast into a pit, was condemned to have his funeral accompanied by a hundred and fifty of his friends, and as a punishment to them for having loved a man who was envious and ungrateful they were bidden to appear at his burial with mournful faces. Had it not been for the mercy of the judges who imputed his crimes in part to his lack of intelligence, his friends would have been commanded to weep. Except for criminals every one here is burned. And this is a very decent and a very reasonable custom, for we think that fire separates the pure from the impure. Moreover, its heat draws to it by sympathy that natural heat which composed the soul and gives it the power to rise continually until it reaches some star, the earth of people more immaterial than we and more intellectual, because their temperament must correspond to and participate in the purity of the globe they inhabit. This radical flame, being rectified still more by the subtlety of that world's elements, finally composes one of the citizens of that burning country.
"However, this is not our best method of burial. When one of our philosophers comes to an age where he feels his mind grow weak and the ice of years impede the movements of his soul, he gathers his friends together for a sumptuous banquet. Then he puts before them the motives which have made him resolve to take leave of Nature, the small hope he has of being able to add anything to his good actions: they either grant him the favour, that is they order him to die, or they severely command him to live. When the majority have placed the disposition of his life in his hands, he announces the day and place to his dearest friends. They purge themselves and fast for twenty-four hours. When they come to the sage's house, they sacrifice to the Sun and enter the room where the hero awaits them lying upon a ceremonial bed. Each one in turn flies to embrace him. When it comes to his best friend, the friend kisses him tenderly, leans upon his stomach, joins mouth to mouth, and with his right hand, which he keeps free, bathes a dagger in his heart. The Lover does not remove his lips from those of his Beloved until he feels he is dead. He then withdraws the steel from his breast, places his mouth on the wound, and drinks his blood and continues to suck until he can swallow no more. Another succeeds him immediately and they carry the first to a bed; when the second is satiated he is taken away to a bed and gives place to a third. Finally, when they are all satiated, after about four or five hours, they bring to each a girl of about sixteen or seventeen. During the next three or four days they enjoy the pleasures of love and they are fed exclusively on the dead man's flesh, which they eat raw, so that if anything is born from these embraces they may be almost sure it is their friend who lives again."
I did not give this man the opportunity of discoursing further, for I left him there and continued my walk. Although I cut it short, the time I spent on the peculiarities of the sights and in visiting certain districts of the town made me arrive more than two hours after dinner was ready. They asked me why I came so late.
"It is not my fault", I replied to the cook, who was complaining of it, "several times in the street I asked what time it was, but they only answered by opening the mouth, clenching the teeth and writhing the face askew."
"What!" cried everybody, "you did not know they were telling you the time that way?"
"Faith", I replied, "they might show their great noses to the Sun all they would before I should have learnt it."
"'Tis a convenience", said they, "which permits them to dispense with a watch. With their teeth they make so exact a dial that when they wish to tell someone the time they simply open their lips and the shadow of their nose falling upon them marks the hour as if upon a dial. Now, in order that you may know why every one in this land has a large nose, learn that as soon as a woman is delivered the midwife carries the child to the Prior of the Seminary. And, at the end of a year his nose is measured before the assembly of experts by the Syndic, and if by this measure it is found too short, the child is reputed a Snub-nose and handed over to the priests, who castrate him. You will perhaps ask the reason of this barbarity and how it happens that we, among whom virginity is a crime, establish continence by force? Learn then that we act in this way from thirty centuries of observation showing that a large nose is a sign over our door that says, 'Here lodges a witty, prudent, courteous, affable, generous and liberal man', and that a small nose is the sign-post of the opposite vices. That is why we make eunuchs of our snub-nosed children, for the Republic prefers to have no children from them than children like them."
He was still talking when a man came in completely naked. I immediately sat down and put on my hat to do him honour, for in that country these are marks of the greatest respect one can show a man.
"The Kingdom", said he, "desires that you will advertise the magistrates before leaving for your country because a mathematician has just promised the council that if, when you reach your world, you will construct a certain machine which he will show you corresponding to another which he will have ready here, he will draw your world to him and join it to our globe."
As soon as he was gone I asked the young host: "I beg you will tell me what is meant by that bronze, shaped like our parts of shame, which hung from that man's belt? During the time that I lived at the court in a cage I saw quantities of them, but as I was almost always surrounded by the Queen's waiting-women I feared I should be lacking in respect to their sex and rank if I directed the conversation to so homely a matter in their presence."
He replied: "Here the females no more than the males would be so ungrateful as to blush at the sight of that which made them; the virgins are not ashamed to respect upon us, in memory of their mother Nature, the one thing which bears her name. Know then that the scarf with which this man is honoured and upon which hangs like a medal the shape of a virile member, is the symbol of a gentleman and the mark which distinguishes a noble from a commoner."
I protest this paradox seemed to me so extravagant that I could not keep from laughing.
"This seems to me a most extraordinary custom", said I to my young host, "since in our world to wear a sword is the mark of nobility."
He was not moved by this but exclaimed: "My little man, the nobles in your world are mad to parade an instrument which is the mark of a hangman, which is only forged for our destruction and is indeed the sworn enemy of everything that lives! And just as mad on the contrary to hide a member without which we should be in the category of things that are not, the Prometheus of every animal and the indefatigable repairer of Nature's weaknesses! Woe to the country where the marks of generation are ignominious and where those of destruction are honourable! You call that member, 'the parts of shame', as if there were anything more glorious than to give life and anything more infamous than to take it away."
During this discourse we continued to dine and as soon as we arose from our beds we went into the garden to take the air. The diversity and the beauty of the place delayed our conversation for some time. But since the noblest desire which then moved me was to convert to our religion a soul so uplifted above the vulgar mob, I exhorted him a thousand times not to smirch with matter the fair genius with which Heaven had endowed him, to draw out of the throng of animals a spirit capable of the Beatific Vision, in fine, to think seriously of uniting some day his immortality with pleasure rather than with pain.
"What!" replied he, with a peal of laughter, "you think your soul immortal to the exclusion of that of beasts? My dear friend, without exaggeration your pride is very insolent! And, I beseech you, whence do you deduce this immortality to the prejudice of the Beasts? Is it because we are gifted with reason and they not? To begin with, I deny that and whenever you please I will prove to you that they reason like ourselves. But even if it were true that reason has been granted us as a prerogative and that it was a privilege reserved to our species alone, does that mean that God must enrich man with immortality when He has already squandered reason upon him? I suppose I should give, in that case, a pistole to a beggar because I gave him a crown yesterday? You yourself see the falsity of the argument and that, on the contrary, if I am just, I ought to give a crown to another rather than a pistole to the first, since the other has had nothing from me. We must conclude from this, my dear friend, that God, who is a thousand times more just than we are, will not have given everything to some and nothing to others. To allege as an example the case of the eldest sons in your world, whose share engulfs almost all the property of the family, is simply a weakness of fathers, who are desirous of perpetuating their names and fear they may be lost or dissipated by poverty. But God is not capable of error, and has been careful not to commit one so great; then, since there is neither before nor after in God's eternity, with him the younger sons are no younger than the elder."
I do not dissimulate that this reason shook me.
"Permit me", said I, "to break off upon this matter, for I do not feel myself strong enough to reply to you. I shall go seek a solution of this difficulty from our mutual Instructor."
Without waiting for his reply I immediately went to the room of this able demon, and waiving any preliminaries I put before him the objections to the immortality of our souls which I had just heard, and this is what he replied:
"My son, this young hot-head is desirous of persuading you that it is unlikely man's soul should be immortal because God, who has called Himself the common Father of all beings, would be unjust if He had favoured one species and abandoned generally all the others to annihilation or misfortune. It is true these reasons glitter a little at a distance. Although I might ask him how he knows that what is just to us is also just to God, how he knows that God measures with our measuring-rod, how he knows that our laws and customs, instituted only to remedy our own disorders, serve also to cut out pieces from the omnipotence of God; I will pass over all these things together with all that has been so divinely answered on this point by the fathers of your Church and I will discover to you a mystery not yet revealed.
"My son, you know that a tree is made from earth, a pig from a tree and a man from a pig. May we not then believe, since all creatures in Nature tend to become more perfect, that they aspire to become men, whose essence is the result of the finest and best imagined mixture in the world and the sole link between the life of brutes and of angels? Only a pedant would deny that these metamorphoses occur. Do we not see that an apple-tree sucks up and digests the surrounding turf by means of the heat of its germ as if through its mouth; that a pig devours its fruit and thereby converts it into a part of itself; and that a man by eating this pig reheats this dead flesh, joins it to himself, and so causes this animal to live again in a more noble species? Thus the Great Pontiff upon whose head you see a tiara was a bunch of grass in my garden sixty years ago. Since God is the common Father of all His creatures and should love them all equally, is it not most credible that by a metempsychosis more reasonable than that of the Pythagoreans all sensible life, all vegetable life, in fine, all matter, will pass through man and then the great day of Judgment will come, to which the prophets direct the secrets of their philosophy?"
Fully satisfied I returned to the garden and began to repeat to my companion what our Master had taught me, when the Physionome arrived to take us to dinner and to the dormitory. I shall not particularize these, because I ate and went to bed as on the preceding day.
The next morning as soon as I was awake I went to arouse my antagonist. "'Tis as great a miracle", said I when I reached him, "to find a great wit like yours buried in sleep, as to see fire without movement."
He was annoyed by this clumsy compliment. "But", cried he in a passionate rage, "will you never free your mouth as well as your reason from these fabulous expressions of miracles? Such words disgrace the name of philosopher. Since the wise man sees nothing in the world which he does not understand or which he considers incapable of being understood, he ought to abominate all these expressions like miracles, prodigies, supernatural events, invented by the stupid to excuse the weaknesses of their minds."
I then felt conscientiously obliged to say something to disabuse him.
"Although you do not believe in miracles", I replied, "they do not cease to occur, and many of them. I have seen them with my own eyes. I have seen more than twenty sick people miraculously cured."
"You say", he interrupted, "that these people were cured miraculously, but you do not know that the power of the imagination is able to combat all maladies, because there is a certain natural balsam extended through our bodies containing all the qualities contrary to all those of every disease that attacks us. Our imagination is warmed by the pain and seeks in its place the specific remedy to oppose the venom, and so cures us. For this reason the ablest doctor in our world advises a patient rather to take an ignorant doctor whom he thinks very skilful than to take a very skilful doctor whom he thinks ignorant, because he believes that our imagination works for our health and when only slightly aided by remedies is capable of curing us, but that the most powerful remedies are too weak when not applied by the imagination! You are surprised that the first men in your world lived so many centuries without having any knowledge of medicine? Their constitution was strong and this universal balm had not been dissipated by the drugs with which your doctors undermine you. To become convalescent they had only to desire strongly and to imagine they were cured; immediately their clear, vigorous and taut imagination plunged into this vital oil, applied the active to the passive and almost in a twinkling they were as well as formerly. Even to-day these astonishing cures continue, but the populace attributes them to a miracle. For my part, I do not believe in a miracle at all and my reason is that it is more easy for all these talkers to be wrong than for the thing to happen. Let me ask them this: A man has a fever and he has been cured. It is clear that during his illness he wished very ardently to recover his health and so made vows; it necessarily followed, since he was ill, that he should die, that he should remain ill or that he should get better. If he had died they would have said God had rewarded him for his pains; they might have maliciously equivocated by saying that He had cured the sick man of all his ills according to his prayers. If his infirmity had persisted they would have said he lacked faith; but because he recovered it is a visible miracle! Is it not far more likely that his fantasy, excited by a violent desire for health, achieved this end? I admit that many of these gentlemen who make vows recover; but how many more do we see who have perished miserably with their vows?"
"But at least", I replied, "if what you say of this balsam is true, it is a proof that our soul is reasonable, since without making use of our reason and without leaning on the support of our will it knows of itself how to apply the active to the passive as if it were outside us. Well, if it is reasonable when it is separated from us we must necessarily conclude that it is spiritual; and if you admit it is spiritual I conclude that it is immortal, since death only happens to animals through those changes of form whereof matter alone is capable."
The young man then sat up in bed and making me sit down also, spoke in much these terms:
"I am not surprised that the souls of beasts (which are corporeal) should die, since they are probably only a harmony of the four qualities, the strength of the blood, a relationship of well-proportioned organs; but I am very surprised that our incorporeal, intellectual and immortal soul should be constrained to leave us for the same reasons that make an ox perish. Has the soul made an agreement with our body that, when the body receives a sword thrust in the heart, a leaden bullet in the brain, a musket shot through the trunk, it will abandon immediately its ruined house? But the soul often breaks this contract, for some die of a wound which others escape; and so every soul must make a separate bargain with its body. Truly this soul which, as they make us believe, is so clever, is very foolish to leave its lodging when it sees that by leaving this place it will find its apartment marked out for it in Hell. And if this soul were spiritual and reasonable by itself, as they say, if it were as capable of intelligence when separated from our body as it is when invested by the body, how is it that those born blind, with all the advantages of this intellectual soul, are not able to imagine what sight is? Why do the deaf not hear? Is it because they are not yet deprived of all their senses by death? What! I cannot then make use of my right hand because I have a left as well? To prove that the soul cannot act without senses although it is spiritual, they allege the case of a painter who cannot make a picture without brushes. Yes, but that is not to say that when a painter, who cannot work without brushes, has lost his colours, his pencils, and his canvases as well, he can then do better. On the contrary, the more obstacles are opposed to his work the more impossible it will be for him to paint. However, they maintain that this soul, which can only act imperfectly when it has lost one of its tools in the course of life, can work perfectly when it has lost them all after our death. If they repeat to us that the soul does not need these instruments, I shall repeat to them that they ought to whip the blind who pretend they cannot see."
"But", said I, "if our soul dies, as I see you wish to deduce, the resurrection you expect would be only a chimera, for God would have to recreate our souls and that would not be resurrection."
He interrupted me and shook his head.
"Hey! Faith!" cried he, "who has deluded you with that fairy-tale? What! You? What! I? What! My maid-servant be resurrected?"
"This is not an amusing tale", I replied, "it is an indubitable truth which I will prove to you."
"And I", said he, "will prove to you the contrary. To begin with, suppose that you ate a Mohammedan; you convert him consequently into your own substance! Is it not true that when you have digested this Mohammedan he is changed partly into flesh, partly into blood, partly into seed? You embrace your wife and with the seed drawn entirely from this Mohammedan's body you cast the mould of a pretty little Christian. I ask; will the Mohammedan have his body at the resurrection? If the earth yields it up to him, the little Christian will not have his body, since it is only a part of the Mohammedan's. If you tell me that the Christian will have his, God will have to take from the Mohammedan that which the little Christian only received from the Mohammedan's body. And so inevitably one or the other will be without a body! You will reply perhaps that God will reproduce from matter a body to furnish the one who is without a body? Yes, but another difficulty stops us. Suppose the damned Mohammedan is resurrected and God gives him a new body, because the Christian has stolen his old one, since the body alone does not make the man, any more than the soul alone, but the two joined together in one person, and since the soul and the body each departed from the man whole, if God then makes the Mohammedan another body, it is no longer the same individual. So God damns a man who is not the man who has merited Hell. One body has whored, it has criminally abused all the senses and, to punish this body, God casts into the fire another, which is virgin and pure, and has never lent its organs to the performance of the slightest crime. And what is even more ridiculous is that this body will have deserved both Hell and Paradise; for, in so far as it is Mohammedan, it must be damned, and in so far as it is Christian, it must be saved. Thus God cannot put it in Paradise without being unjust and rewarding with glory instead of with the damnation it deserved as Mohammedan; and He cannot cast it into Hell without being unjust and rewarding with eternal death instead of the blessedness it deserved as Christian. Then, if He wishes to be just, He must both save and damn this man eternally."
"I have nothing to reply", I answered, "to your sophistic arguments against the resurrection; God has said it and God cannot lie."
"Not so fast", he retorted, "you are still at 'God has said'; you must first prove there is a God, which for my part I wholly deny."
"I shall not waste my time", said I, "by repeating to you the obvious demonstrations used by philosophers to prove it; I should have to reiterate all that has ever been written by reasonable men. I simply ask you what harm there is in believing it; I am assured you cannot discover any. Then if nothing can be derived from it but what is useful, why do you not accept it? If there is a God, and you do not believe in Him, you will not only be mistaken but you will have disobeyed the precept which bids you believe in Him; and if there is no God, you will be no better off than we!"
"On the contrary", he replied, "I shall be better off than you, for if there is no God, you and I will be equal. But if, on the contrary, there is a God, I shall not have offended against something which I believed did not exist, since to sin one must either know or will. Do you not see that even a rather foolish man would not think that a porter had injured him if the porter had done it accidentally, or had taken him for someone else, or if he had been drunk? How much more then should God, who is wholly steadfast, forbear to grow angry with us for not having known Him since He Himself has refused us the means of knowing Him. On your honour now, little animal, if belief in God were so necessary to us, if it were a matter of our eternity, would not God Himself have inculcated in us all a light as clear as that of the Sun which hides itself from no one? To feign that He plays hide-and-seek with men, says like children, 'Cuckoo, there he is!' that is to say sometimes hides Himself, sometimes shows Himself, disguises Himself to some and reveals Himself to others—that is to make oneself a God who is either silly or malicious, for if I have come to know Him through the strength of my genius, the merit is His and not mine, since He might have given me an imbecile soul or imbecile organs which would have made me incapable of knowing Him. And, on the contrary, if He gave me a mind incapable of understanding Him, it is not my fault but His, since He could have given me a mind so keen that I should have comprehended Him."
These ridiculous and devilish opinions made me shudder from head to foot. I began to look at this man with a little more attention and I was startled to notice in his face something indefinably frightful which I had not yet perceived. His eyes were small and deep-set, his complexion swarthy, his mouth large, his chin hairy, his nails black. O God! thought I at once, this wretch will be damned after this life and he may even be the anti-Christ so much spoken of in our World.
I did not wish to let him know what I thought, because of the esteem I had for his wit, and truly the favourable aspects of Nature towards his cradle had made me conceive some friendship for him. Yet I could not so wholly contain myself but that I broke out into imprecations which menaced him with a bad end. But, throwing back my anger at me, he exclaimed: "Yes, by death...." I do not know what he meant to say but at this moment there was a knock at the door of our room and a large, black, hairy man came in. He approached us, seized the blasphemer by the middle and carried him off up the chimney. My pity for this wretch's fate obliged me to clasp him in order to drag him from the Ethiopian's claws, but he was so powerful that he carried us off both and in a moment we were up among the clouds. I was obliged to grasp him tightly now, not from love of my neighbour but from fear of falling. After passing I know not how many days in travelling through the sky, without knowing what would become of me, I saw I was approaching our world. Already I could distinguish Asia from Europe and Europe from Africa. And now I was so near that I could not lift my eyes beyond Italy, when my heart told me that this Devil was no doubt carrying my host to Hell, body and soul, and that he was passing by way of our earth, because Hell is in its centre. I wholly forgot this thought and all that had happened to me since the Devil had been our carriage, through the fear I was cast into by the sight of a flaming mountain which I almost touched. The sight of this burning spectacle made me cry out "Jesus Maria!" I had scarcely finished the last letter when I found myself lying upon the grass at the top of a little hill with two or three shepherds around me reciting litanies and speaking to me in Italian.
"Oh!" cried I, "praised be God! At last I have found Christians in the world of the Moon. Tell me, my friends, in what province of your world I am now?"
"In Italy", they replied.
"What", I interrupted, "is there an Italy in the world of the Moon also?"
I had still reflected so little on this accident that I had not yet perceived they were speaking to me in Italian and that I was replying in the same tongue.
When I was altogether disabused and nothing further prevented me from recognising that I was once more in this world, I let myself be taken where these peasants wished to lead me. But I had not arrived at the gates of ——, when all the dogs in the town came rushing upon me and had not my fear caused me to rush into a house and shut the door against them I should infallibly have been devoured.
A quarter of an hour afterwards, while I was resting in this house, all the dogs of the Kingdom I verily believe could be heard in a turmoil outside. All kinds from the bulldog to the lapdog could be seen howling with a most terrible fury as if they were keeping the anniversary of their first Adam.
This adventure caused no little surprise to all people who saw it; but as soon as I had directed my reflections upon this circumstance, I imagined at once that these animals were infuriated with me because of the world whence I came. "For", said I to myself, "since they are accustomed to bay the Moon on account of the pain she causes them from so far, no doubt they would have thrown themselves upon me because I smell of the Moon, whose odour annoys them."
I exposed myself to the Sun stark-naked on a terrace, to cleanse myself from this bad air. I dried myself some four or five hours, at the end of which I went down and the dogs no longer smelling the influence which had made me their enemy all returned home.
At the port I inquired when a ship would leave for France and when I was embarked my mind was wholly occupied in ruminating on the wonders of my voyage. A thousand times I admired the providence of God, which had placed those naturally impious men in a situation where they could not corrupt His chosen, and had punished them for their pride by giving them up to their own self-conceit. And I do not doubt that so far He has put off sending someone who preached them the Gospel, because He knew they would abuse the occasion and that this resistance would only serve to make them merit a harsher punishment in the next world.
Frontispiece to Lovell's expurgated edition.