A Night in the Luxembourg

by Remy de Gourmont

Friend, friend, are we not more beautiful than women?

Yes, Elise was more beautiful than a woman. I thought I was looking at a divinity. I thought I was becoming a god. My mouth took possession of her mouth, and my left arm supported her head, while my right hand sought under the agitation of her bosom the beating of the heart that I desired. It became dark night except in my head and in my senses, and it seemed to me that Elise was mine, and that cries left our moist and trembling mouths. But perhaps it was only an illusion. And yet, I perfectly remember that, when the light came back, our eyes were full of gratitude and of understanding. Moreover, we were now so close to one another that we seemed but a single body.

Insensibly we recovered our former attitudes. The little one, when once more we looked at the external world, was sleeping on her friend's knees, and our master was meditating, his head on his hand. What had passed before us, what mysterious accomplishment, I did not then think of asking myself, and now, if I were to ask, I should not know what to answer. Illusion had doubtless buried us all alike in a rain of roses, and the magician had not escaped his own magic.

The great happiness I felt quickened my intelligence. When our master began to speak again, I felt that a soft beam of sunlight was falling upon me.

HE

I told you that the religion of the ancient Greeks was that which translated with least ugliness and least falsity the true state of the world which is invisible to you. There are gods, that is to say, a race of men as superior to other men as you are superior to the most intelligent or the best domesticated animals. You have conquered the earth; my ancestors conquered space, and colonised the greater number of the planets that gravitate round the sun. Our possible domain does not extend beyond the solar system; our actual domain does not stretch beyond Jupiter, where my father dwells, and its limit in the direction of the sun is this earth upon which we are. For a great number of centuries I have chosen Mars as a resting-place, and this brought me near you, and gave me certain humane inclinations. The other planets, by reason either of their distance from or of their nearness to the sun, are inaccessible to me, almost as much so as to yourselves. I do not know what goes on in them. As for the infinite worlds which are spread beyond our sphere, they are for me as for you the unknown and the unknowable.

What I have just told you will not seem very new. Many of your philosophers have had imaginations that at some point touched this truth. Voltaire made Micromegas to tease you; but, submitting to the appearances of physical laws, he made an immoderate giant of him. Why so? Are not the ants, next to men, the most intelligent of terrestrial animals? I think I remember that at a far-distant epoch, that your geologists call, I believe, the coal age, the termites displayed on your globe a sort of genius. These little beings, so fragile, were cut short in their development by the lowering of the temperature. They no longer live but with a slackened vitality, like other insects; their intelligence, no longer nourished by an abundant physical activity, has congealed; they stopped at a point thenceforth impassable for them, and what they once accomplished by choice and will, they now no longer do except mechanically. But let us leave Micromegas....

I Micromegas has almost ceased to interest us. You have said, a little quickly for my intelligence, many things that would delight me if I better understood them. This slackened life ....

HE

Terrestrial life is precarious since it is at the mercy of atmospherical circumstances. Animals that have not a very high temperature are destined to expend their strength in a perpetual labour of adaptation. If the original heat had increased instead of diminishing, the termites and the ants would perhaps be two great nations, sharing between them the empire of the world, and man would be one of their preys. But you discovered the art of fire and raised yourself above all other animals. Fire, in giving you a constant summer, also gave you leisure. Thence your civilisations, proud daughters of idleness, who deny their mother. It is from idleness that everything has been born among men. From the year in which one of your ancestors was able to pass the winter beside his fire, date the arts, the sciences, games, love, all delights. Leisure is indeed the greatest and the most beautiful of man's conquests. But, though you have known how to conquer, though you have known how to create, you have scarcely ever known how to use your conquests or your creations. After conquering leisure, you disdained it, and slaves, ashamed of the inactivity of their domesticated hands, set themselves to preach among you the sanctity of labour. Poor madmen! And are you not already on the way to spoil woman? Have you not already succeeded in insinuating into her heart the shameful principles of Jewish morality? Have you not resolved, in your narrow masculine pride, to undo the work of your ancestors and to reduce to the position of mean and lesser men these creatures who used to dominate you with all their beauty and with all their tenderness? You educate them; you teach them the useless stupidities that make your own brains ugly; soon you will forbid them ornament, you will forbid them love, you will forbid them to make you happy! But I will take up this discourse later. It is a digression due to your curiosity. We were speaking of Micromegas. Well, I am, if you will, Micromegas, reduced to our human proportions. No more than he have I absolute power over men; I cannot even crush them, like that Titan, in absent-mindedness or in pleasure. I have scarcely any power over men: I can, when I strongly wish it, insinuate into them some few of my ideas. It is this that men have called my incarnations. I have never become incarnate. My own flesh, almost immortal, and almost incorruptible, suffices me.