VIII.
Little by little the mind frees itself from the prejudices in which it was reared; light dawns; it thinks for itself; thus it is that I have attained to the true explanation of things.
Our first ancestors (and the gutter cats have retained this belief) said that heaven is a very lofty granary, well covered, where the sun never hurts the eyes.
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In this granary, my great-aunt used to say, there are troops of rats so fat that they can hardly walk, and the more we eat of them, the more there are to eat.
But it is evident that this is the opinion of poor devils, who, since they have never eaten anything but rat, cannot imagine a better diet. Besides, granaries are wood-color or gray, and the sky is blue, which finishes their confusion.
In truth, they rest their opinion upon a sufficiently shrewd remark: “It is evident,” they say, “that the sky is a granary of straw or flour, for there come out of it very often clouds light, as when the wheat is winnowed, or white, as when bread is sprinkled in the kneading-trough.”
But I reply to them that the clouds are not formed by the chaff of grain or the dust of flour; for when they fall, it is water that we receive.
Others, more refined, have maintained that the Dutch oven was God, saying that it is the fount of every blessing, turns unceasingly, goes to the fire without being burned, and that the sight of it is enough to throw one into ecstasy.
In my opinion they have erred here only because they saw it through the window, from a distance, in a poetic, colored, sparkling smoke, beautiful as the sun at evening. But I, who have sat near it during whole hours, I know that it has to be sponged, mended, wiped; and in acquiring knowledge, I have lost the innocent illusions of heart and stomach. The mind must be opened to conceptions more vast, and reason by more certain methods. Nature is everywhere uniform with herself, and in small things offers the image of the great.
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From what do all animals spring? from an egg; the earth then is a very great egg; I even add that it is a broken egg.
You will convince yourself of this if you examine the form and the limits of this valley, which is the visible world. It is concave like an egg, and the sharp edges by which it rejoins the sky are jagged, are keen-edged and white like those of a broken shell.
The white and the yolk, pressed into lumps, have formed these blocks of stone, these houses and the whole solid earth. Some parts have remained soft and form the surface that men plough; the rest runs in water and makes the pools, the rivers; each spring-time there runs a little that is new.
As to the sun, nobody can doubt its use; it is a great red firebrand that is moved back and forth above the egg to cook it gently; the egg has been broken on purpose, in order that it may be the better impregnated with the heat; the cook always does so. The world is a great beaten egg.
Now that I have reached this stage of wisdom, I have nothing more to ask of nature, nor of men, nor of any one; except, perhaps, some little tidbits from the roaster. In future I have only to cradle myself to rest in my wisdom; for my perfection is sublime, and no thinking cat has penetrated into the secret of the world so far as I.
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