Colas Breugnon

by Romain Rolland

Now comes Alexander, beautiful as the god Bacchus, whose dress he wears, returning in his triumph from India. See him high in a great car drawn by eight horses and covered with rich carpets and garlands of green leaves; hear the strains of flutes and hautboys as he feasts and drinks with his generals, all of them crowned with flowers: women leaping about him in the dance, and his great army at his back. Wasn’t it marvelous? Then there was Queen Cleopatra, Lamia the flute-player, and Statira, who was so beautiful that it hurt your eyes to look at her! In spite of Antony, Alexander, and Artaxerxes, all these enchantresses are mine, now at my pleasure. I can enter their bowers, drink with Thaïs, embrace Roxana, and carry Cleopatra away in my arms wrapped in her carpet. It is possible for me even to imitate Antiochus, who was in love with his mother-in-law, although that is a singular idea to my notion.

I go out to exterminate the Gauls; I come, I see, I conquer; and the best of it all is that it does not cost me one single drop of blood! Then, too, my riches are beyond counting; each story is a caravel, laden with the treasures of the East or Barbary; bringing precious metals, old wines, strange beasts, and captured slaves of the rarest beauty:—such breasts, such ivory limbs! All this is mine, these empires rose, flourished and disappeared, only to give me pleasure. I feel as if I were at a Carnival, where in turn I can wear every man’s mask and disguise, even to putting on his skin, and with it his thoughts and passions. Thus I am at once the music, and the dancer, the book and old Plutarch, who was inspired to write it in a most fortunate hour.

How good it is to let the rhythm of words and phrases carry you off, dancing and laughing, into space, free from all trammels of the body. This mind, this thought of ours is God Himself. Praise be to His Holy Spirit!—Sometimes I pause in the midst of the story to imagine how it will turn out, and then compare my own fancy with the image which nature or art had created. In the case of art, I am so sharp that I can generally guess right; and then how I laugh at my own cleverness! But the old witch, life, is often too much for me!—her resources are beyond our feeble comprehension. There is only one part of the tale which she never troubles herself to vary; all her stories end in the same way—wit, war, love—you know what happens to them—they disappear into the darkness; and on this one point she certainly does repeat herself.

She is like a naughty child, breaking her toys when she is tired of them, till I am provoked to blame her for being so destructive, and snatch the pieces out of her hands; but it is too late; they are broken past repair; and all that I can do, is to cherish what is left, as Glodie rocks the remains of her doll in her arms.

At each revolution of the dial this Death comes nearer and nearer, like a beautiful refrain: “Strike hour! ring bells, ding dong ding.” Now, I fancy myself Cyrus, Emperor of Persia, Conqueror of Asia; hear what I say:—“Friend, envy me not the small space of earth, which covers my poor body.”—I stand beside Alexander as he reads this epitaph and trembles, for in it he seems to hear his own voice rising from the tomb.

Now that you are dead, great Cyrus and Alexander, how near you both seem to me; do I dream? or are they really there? I pinch myself to find out if I am awake, yes, there on the table by my side are two coins which I dug up in my vineyard last year, with the profiles of bearded Commodus dressed as Hercules, and Crispina Augusta, with her heavy chin and her shrewish nose.—“This is no dream,” say I; “for here is Rome between my thumb and forefinger.”

My greatest pleasure was to lose myself in reflections on moral issues; to raise once more, questions long settled by force; should I cross the Rubicon,—or not? I could never make up my mind! I fought Brutus and Cæsar in turn; changed my opinion and argued on either side with so much eloquence that I could not tell what I believed. In this way the subject takes possession of you, as you give and take, strike out and hit back, till at last you are transfixed by your own blade! Did you ever hear of such an idea? But it all comes of reading Plutarch, with his smooth tongue, and pleasant way of calling you “my friend”! He gets you first on one side and then on the other; and has as many points of view as he has stories to tell you; so that the hero I love best is always the last one that I have read about.

We are all chained to Fortune’s car; her triumphs over history are greater than Pompey’s, as her wheel turns, never resting for a moment. She has as many phases as the moon, says Menelaus, in the words Sophocles puts into his mouth; and for those who are still in her first quarter, that is a comforting reflection.

I would sometimes say to myself: “What does all this matter, Breugnon? What to you are the glories of Rome, and the crimes and follies of these old rascals? You have your own faults and troubles to think of, why go out of your way to worry over those of people who have been dead and gone for eighteen hundred years? To a sober middle-class citizen of Clamecy, Cæsar, Antony, and their light-o’-love, Cleopatra, these Persian princes who murdered their sons and married their daughters, were extremely depraved people; the most virtuous thing they ever did was to die; so peace to their ashes!—but how can a respectable man find pleasure in reading about such insanities? Think of Alexander, who spent the treasures of a nation on the burial of his beautiful favorite, Ephestion. Are you not shocked by such extravagance?—It is bad enough to murder a lot of people, for men are savage beasts; but when it comes to wasting so much good money, that these tyrants had never earned, how can you smile at such wickedness? It is really absurd to see you sitting up with your eyes wide open, as proud as if you yourself had been fool enough to scatter these millions to the wind. Surely the worst idiot of all is he who delights in the follies of others!”

After a discourse of this kind, the other side of me would make answer: “Colas, you talk like a printed book, but, none the less, I would give my right hand for these things which you call nonsense; and I find more life in the shadows of the men who died two thousand years ago, than in those who move and breathe today. I feel that I know and love them, and would consent to let Alexander kill me as he did Clytus, if afterward he would come and weep over my body. It is all real to me; my heart is in my throat when I see Cæsar in the Senate-house, his back against a pillar like a stag at bay, the conspirators’ knives searching for his life; and I am in ecstasy when Cleopatra floats by me in her gilded barge, surrounded by Nereids and young pages, naked and beautiful as the day. The perfumed breeze blows across my face, and I open my big nostrils, the better to inhale the delicious fragrance.”