"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.