CHAPTER V
SOME PRIVATE RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WRITER
ON a certain morning in 1839 the author of this book had a visit from Alphonse Esquiros, who said: “Let us pay our respects to the Mapah.”1 The natural question arose: “But in any case, who or what is the Mapah?”…“He is a god,” was the answer…. “Many thanks,” said the author, “but I pay my devotions only to gods unseen.”…“Come notwithstanding; he is the most eloquent, most radiant and magnificent fool in the visible order of things”…. “My friend, I am in terror of fools: their complaint is contagious.”…“Granted, dilectissime, and yet I am calling on you.”…“Admitted, and things being so, we will pay our respects to the Mapah.”
In an appalling garret there was a bearded man of majestic demeanour, who invariably wore over his clothes the tattered cloak of a woman, and had in consequence rather the air of a destitute dervish. He was surrounded by several men, bearded and ecstatic like himself, and in addition to these there was a woman with motionless features, who seemed like an entranced somnambulist. The prophet's manner was abrupt and yet sympathetic; he had hallucinated eyes and an infectious quality of eloquence. He spoke with emphasis, warmed to his subject quickly, chafed and fumed till a white froth gathered on his lips. Abbé Lamennais was once termed “old ninety-three fulfilling its Easter duties”. The catch phrase is more suited to the Mapah and his mysticism, as will be shewn by a fragment from one of his lyrical enthusiasms.
“Transgression was inevitable for man: it was decreed by his destiny, that he might be the instrument of his own reconstruction, that the greatness and majesty of God might be manifested in the majesty and greatness of human toil, passing through its successive phases of light and darkness. But primitive unity was destroyed by the Fall; suffering entered the world in the guise of the serpent, and the Tree of Life became the Tree of Death. Things being at this pass, God said to the woman: ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,' yet added afterwards: ‘Thou shalt crush the serpent's head.' And the first slave was a woman; she accepted her divine mission, and the pains of travail began. From the first hour of the Fall, the task of humanity has been, for this reason, a great and terrible task of initiation. For this also the terms of that initiation are all equally sacred in the eyes of God. Their Alpha is our common mother Eve, while the Omega is Liberty, who is our common mother also.
“I beheld a vast ship, having a gigantic mast with its crow's nest at the top; one of the ship's extremities looked to the West, the other to the East. On the western side it was poised upon the cloudy summits of three mountains, their bases lost in a raging sea. On the flank of each mountain was inscribed its ominous name. The first was Golgotha, the second Mont St. Jean, but the third was St. Helena. In the middle way of the mast, on the western side, there was erected a five-armed cross,1 on which a woman was expiring. The inscription above her head was: FRANCE: JUNE 18, 1815: GOOD FRIDAY. The five arms of the cross represented the five divisions of the globe: the woman's head rested on Europe and was encircled by a cloud. But at the end of the ship to the East there was no darkness; and the keel paused at the threshold of the city of God, by the summit of a triumphal arch in the full rays of the sun. Here the woman reappeared, but this time transfigured and glorious. She rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and on that stone was written: RESTORATION, days of the tomb: July 29, 1830: EASTER.”
It will be seen that the Mapah was a successor of Catherine Théot and Dom Gerle; and yet—such is the strange sympathy between follies—he told us one day confidentially that he was Louis XVII returned to earth for a work of regeneration, while the woman who shared his life was Marie Antoinette of France. He explained further that his revolutionary theories were the last word of the violent pretensions of Cain, destined as such to ensure, by a fatal reaction, the victory of the just Abel. Now Esquiros and I visited the Mapah to enjoy his extravagances, but our imaginations were overcome by his eloquence. We were two college friends, like Louis Lambert and Balzac, and we had nourished dreams in common concerning impossible renunciations and unheard-of heroisms. After visiting Gannea u—for this was the name of the Mapah—we took it into our heads that it would be a great thing to communicate the last word of revolution to the world and to seal the abyss of anarchy, like Curtius, by casting ourselves therein. Our students' extravagance gave birth to the Gospel of the People and the Bible of Liberty, follies for which Esquiros and his ill-starred friend paid but too dearly. Hereof is the danger of enthusiastic manias; they are catching; one does not approach with impunity the edge of the precipice of madness.
The incident which now follows is a different and more terrible fatality. A nervous and delicate young man named Sobrier was numbered among the Mapah's disciples; he lost his head completely and believed himself predestined to save the world by provoking the supreme crisis of a universal revolution. The days of 1848 drew towards the threshold. A commotion had led to some change in the ministry, but the episode seemed closed. Paris had an air of contentment and the boulevards were illuminated. Suddenly a young man appeared in the populous streets of the Quartier Saint-Martin. He was preceded by two street arabs, one bearing a torch and the other beating to arms. A large crowd gathered; the young man got upon a post and harangued the people. His words were incoherent and incendiary, but the gist was to proceed to the Boulevard des Capucines and acquaint the ministry with the will of the people. The demoniac repeated the same harangue at every corner of the streets and presently he was marching at the head of a great concourse, a pistol in each hand, still heralded by torch and tambour. The frequenters of the boulevards joined out of mere curiosity, and subsequently it was a crowd no longer but the massed populace surging through the Boulevard des Italiens. In the midst of this the young man and his street Arabs disappeared, but before the Hotel des Capucines a pistol-shot was fired upon the people. This shot started the revolution, and it was fired by a fool.
Throughout that night two carts loaded with corpses perambulated the streets by torchlight; on the morrow all Paris was barricaded, and Sobrier was reported at home in a state of unconsciousness. It was he who, without knowing what he did, had for a moment shaken the world. Ganneau and Sobrier are dead and no harm is done them by reciting this terrible instance of the magnetism of enthusiasts and the fatalities which may be entailed by the nervous diseases of certain persons. The story is drawn from a reliable source and its revelations may sooth the conscience of that Belisarius of poetry who is the author of the History of the Girondins.
The magnetic phenomena produced by Ganneau continued even after his death. His widow, a woman of no education and little intelligence, the daughter of an honest peasant of Auvergne, remained in the static somnambulism in which she had been placed by her husband.1 Like the child which assumes the form of its mother's imagination, she has become a living image of Marie Antoinette, when a prisoner at the Conciergerie. Her manners are those of a queen who is widowed and desolate for ever; a complaint sometimes escapes her, as though she were weary of her dream, but she is sovereignly indignant with any who seek to awake her. For the rest, she has no symptom of mental alienation; her outward conduct is reasonable, her life perfectly honourable and regular. Nothing is more pathetic, to our thinking, than this persistent obsession of a being fondly loved who lives again in a conjugal hallucination. Had Artemis existed literally it would be permissible to believe that Mausol was also a powerful mesmerist, and that he had gained and fixed for ever the affections of an extremely sensitive woman, outside all limits of free will and reason.
1 I wish that it were possible to quote the moving panegyric on Ganneau in a letter addressed by Éliphas I.évi to Alexandre Erdan and printed by him in La France Mystique, vol. ii, pp. 184-188. He is described as one of the élite of intelligence, an artist, a poet of original and inexhaustible eloquence. He was sometimes bizarre but never absurd or wearisome. He was, finally, one of those hearts under the inspiration of which the zealous will crucify themselves with joy for the ungrateful. Erdan once saw Ganneau addressing a crowd in the Place de la Concorde, “uplifting his great arms and raising to heaven his beautiful Christ-like head”.
1 I suppose that this would be a St. Andrew's cross with the addition of a vertical branch, on which would rest the head of the crucified person.
1 There was a son of this marriage, and in 1855 M. Alexandre Erdan was inquiring what had become of him.