Voyages to the Moon and the Sun

by Cyrano de Bergerac

"Oh you, whoever you may be", cried I, throwing myself upon my knees, "the wisest of all the oaks of Dodona, who deign to take the trouble to instruct me, know that your lesson is not wasted upon one who is ungrateful; if ever I return to my native globe I make a vow that I will publish the marvels which you do me the honour to let me witness."

As I finished this protestation I heard the same voice continue thus: "Little man, look twelve or fifteen paces to your right hand, you will see two twin trees of moderate height intertwining their branches and their roots and trying in a thousand ways to make themselves one."

I turned my eyes towards these love-plants and I noticed that the leaves of both were lightly agitated by a half-voluntary emotion, while their rustling created a murmur so delicate that it scarcely reached the ear; and yet one would have said that by this means they were trying to question and answer each other.

When the time necessary for me to notice this double plant had passed, my good friend the oak took up the thread of his discourse thus:

"You cannot have lived so long without the famous friendship of Pylades and Orestes coming to your knowledge?

"I would describe to you all the joys of a gentle passion and I would relate to you all the miracles with which these lovers have astonished their age, did I not fear that so much light would dazzle the eyes of your reason, and therefore I will only paint these two young Suns in their eclipse.

"It will suffice you then to know that one day in battle the brave Orestes sought his dear Pylades, to taste the pleasure of conquering or dying in his presence. When he perceived him in the midst of a hundred arms of iron lifted above his head, alas! what did he become? He rushed despairingly through a forest of pikes, he shouted, he howled, he foamed; but how badly I express the horror of his movements in his despair! He pulled out his hair, he gnawed his hands, he tore his wounds; and at the end of this description I am obliged to say that the means of expressing his grief died with him. When he thought to cut a path with his sword to rescue Pylades, a mountain of men opposed his passage. Yet he cut through them; and after trampling long over the bloody trophies of his victory, little by little he approached Pylades; but Pylades seemed to him so near death that he scarcely dared ward off his enemies any more for fear of surviving the thing for which he lived: to see his eyes filled already with the shadows of death one would even have said he tried to poison the murderers of his friend with his looks. At last Pylades fell lifeless; and the amorous Orestes, feeling his own life ready to leave his lips, yet retained it until his wandering sight sought and found Pylades among the dead, when, kissing his mouth, he seemed as if he would throw his soul into his friend's body.[71]

"The younger of these heroes died of grief on the body of his friend; and you must know that from their rotting flesh (which doubtless had fertilised the earth) there sprang up among the whitening bones of their skeletons two young saplings, whose trunks and branches mingled together and seemed to hasten their growth only to twine more closely together. It was apparent they had changed their being without forgetting what they had been; for their perfumed buds leaned one upon the other and warmed each other with their breath as if to make them open more quickly. But what shall I say of the loving portioning maintained by their fraternity? Never was the juice in which nourishment resides offered to their stock but that they shared it with ceremony. Never was one of them ill-nourished but that the other was sick with weariness; both drew from the breasts of their nurse within as you suckle them from without. Finally these happy lovers produced apples, and such miraculous apples that they performed even more miracles than their Fathers. Those who ate the apples of one tree immediately became passionately in love with anyone who had eaten the fruit of the other. And this happened almost every day, because the shoots of Pylades surrounded, or were surrounded by, those of Orestes, and their almost twin fruits could not resolve to part from each other.

"Nature, however, had differentiated the energy of their double essence so carefully that when the fruit of one of the trees was eaten by a man and the fruit of the other tree by another man, this caused a reciprocal friendship and when the same thing happened to two persons of different sex it caused love, but a vigorous love which retained the character of its cause; for although this fruit proportioned its effect to the eater's capacity, softening its virtue in a woman, it still preserved something masculine.

"It must also be noticed that he who ate more of the fruit was the more beloved. This fruit failed not to be very sweet and very beautiful, since nothing is so beautiful and so sweet as friendship; and these two qualities of beauty and goodness which are never met with in one person caused them to be in such repute. How many times have its miraculous virtues multiplied the copies of Orestes and Pylades! Since that time have been seen Hercules and Theseus, Achilles and Patroclus, Nisus and Euryalus; in short, an innumerable number, who by more than human friendships have consecrated their memory in the temple of eternity. Cuttings were taken to Peloponnesus and the drill-ground, where the Thebans trained their youth, was ornamented with them. These twin trees were planted in lines and at that season of the year when the fruit hangs upon the boughs, the young men, who went to the park every day, were tempted by the beauty of the fruit and did not abstain from eating it: usually their courage felt the effect at once. They were seen to exchange souls pell-mell; each of them became the half of the other, lived less in himself than in his friend, while the most cowardly would attempt dangerous things for his friend's sake.