A Night in the Luxembourg - Remy de Gourmont

Your social state is an exhibition of madness. The Roman slaves had a life less hard than that of many of your work-people. After the Semitic fashion, you make even the women work! Rich and poor, all alike, you know nothing of the joys of leisure. You give to work all the hours of your days, some to get bread, others to achieve a pleasure that fatigue prevents them from enjoying, and others again, the maddest of all, to increase their wealth. You have reached that degree of imbecility in which labour is looked upon as not only honourable but sacred, when, actually, it is but a sad necessity. You have lifted this necessity to the rank of the virtues, when it is, without doubt, no more than the vice of a perverted being for whom life, short as it is, is only a lengthy tedium.

And of this work, which at least allows us to breathe and to eat, there is not enough for all. Thousands of beings in the most civilised towns die every day of hunger, and with a slow death. They are in agony for ten, for twenty years ...

Increase and multiply. That is the work of my father. He was seized with a sort of jealous and mischievous love for the Jews, a sufficiently restless little people, and showed himself curious to encourage their natural pride so far as to make it immoderate. The result was comic and sad. These ignorant Bedouins believed themselves destined to dominate the world, and then disappeared as a nation at the very moment when this domination was accomplished. A singular fate for the Jews, to have given mankind a religion in which they do not believe themselves!

Alas! At the request of my ageing father, who began to find these prolific barbarians tedious, after having tried to enlighten Jesus, who had too many disciples, I interested myself in Saint Paul. I came to him as I have come to you; he was dazzled, and believed that the vision had given him a divine mission. I followed him in his journeys. His energy amused me; but at Athens, I ranged myself with his opponents, whose laughter I excited. Later on, I let him die without consolations; his pride sufficed him.

I thought this man less mad than the other thaumaturgists who, like him, amused the crowds, but the idea of God went to his head, and he began to believe in me, supposing me omnipotent. It was then that I ceased to visit him, for I do not care to make myself the facile accomplice of religious divagations. Left to himself, he went on hearing me; my voice sounded like a buzzing in his deaf ears. His faith grew measureless, and he accepted martyrdom. How different from the charming Epicurus, for whom our conversations were never more than a lofty diversion! But this Paul, although hallucinated, was not incapable of a certain imposture, and it was assuredly to magnify himself in the eyes of fools that he pretended to have been ravished to heaven. It is true that he believed in my resurrection. What tales! One would say that men only give words a precise meaning in order to have the pleasure of using them in an opposite sense. Your brain plays very singular tricks. The dead are dead. The dead are not dead. The dead are living. The dead alone are alive. What jugglers you are!

I ceased to do anything but amuse myself with the developments of the new religion. It produced very charming feminine souls. What a priceless creature was Saint Cecilia, what an ingenuous lover. Perhaps no other woman has known nights so delicious as those that Cecilia passed with the angel who came to visit her....