Chapter 1.

Which is a sort of an introduction

 

 

“No! on my honor,” I cried to myself, and threw the unfortunate volume twenty paces away.

It was, however, a Titus-Livius, printed by Elzevir and bound by Padeloup.

“No! I won’t wear my mind and memory out any more with this detestable nonsense! No,” I continued, propping my slippers firmly on the andirons as if by an act of will, “I won’t have it said that a man of sense would let himself grow old over these stupid gazettes from that credulous, blathering, lying Paduan, not while he still has the domains of imagination and feeling open to him!

“O fantasy!” I went on enthusiastically, “Mother of pleasant fables, genies, and fairies! enchantress with your brilliant lies, balancing yourself lightly on the crenellations of old towers, losing your way in the moonlight with your train of illusions in the vast domains of the unknown; letting so many sweet reveries fall in passing over the village evenings, and surrounding a girl's maiden bed with delightful apparitions!”

At that point, I stopped, because this invocation threatened to run on too long.

“Real history,” said I, gravely, “is the expression of blind partiality, the story consecrated to the winning side, a classic fable which matters so little to the world that no one bothers to contradict it. Why, who was it assured me today, for example, that there are more truths in Mezeray than in the simple stories of the good Perrault, and more in Byzantine History than in the Thousand and One Nights? I’d certainly like to know who it was,” I added, crossing one leg over the other, “because after that there’s nothing to add to the form of that sacramental protest! And I’d certainly like to know what could be more probable than the travels in Loretta’s Santa Casa or in the Aerial Voyager! After all, my dear sirs, the larger half of the known world believes firmly in the elocution of Balaam’s ass or Mahomet’s pigeon, so what objections do you have to the oratorical success of Puss in Boots? Because, after all, the historian of Puss in Boots was, as everyone admits, a decent, pious, sincere man, who won the public’s confidence. The tradition he drew on has never been contested in this doubting century. Even the severe Fréret and the skeptical Boulanger, who tried to outdo each other in attacking everything that men respect, let it alone even in their most audacious diatribes. And even children who don't know how to read talk every day about Puss in Boots, a cat from a good house who wore boots like a gendarme and argued like an attorney. And even if the family of the Marquis of Carabas has disappeared from our annals of nobility—and I wouldn't swear to it—the extinction of illustrious lines is so common in time of war or revolution, that you can't draw any conclusion from that against the reality of the house of Carabas. History and historians! A curse on it, and a curse on them! I take the fairy Urgande to witness that I find the illusions of lunatics a thousand times more believable!”

“Lunatics!” interrupted Daniel Cameron. I'd forgotten he was standing there behind my armchair, patiently and respectfully, waiting to hand me my frock coat. “Lunatics, monsieur! There’s a superb house for them in Glasgow.”

“So I’ve heard,” said I, turning towards my Scottish valet. “What sort of men are they?”

“I wouldn’t dare to tell monsieur precisely,” answered Daniel, looking down with an embarrassment. Even so, it was possible to guess from his look at some sort of cunning, malicious hidden motive or other. “Lunatics are men who are called that, I suppose, because they pay as little attention to our world’s business as if they’d come down from the Moon. Why, they talk instead about nothing but things which could never have happened anywhere—except perhaps in the Moon.”

“There’s delicacy—almost profundity—in that idea, Daniel,” I said. “Indeed, we observe that nature, in the methodical stretch of the innumerable years of creation, has left no space empty. Thus the tenacious lichen which identifies itself with the rock combines mineral and plant. The polyp, with its branching arms, vegetative and regrowable, reproducing itself from a cutting, combines plant and animal. The pongo ape, which could easily become educable—and probably has, somewhere—combines quadruped and human. At humanity, the extension of our natural classification stops, but not the extension of the generative principle of creations and worlds. It’s not only possible—it’s certain. Why, I’m not even afraid to lay it down as a law: if it were not so, all the harmony of the universe would be destroyed! It’s incontestable: the chain of being continues uninterrupted across the entire vortex of our lives, and from our vortex to all the others, and on to the incomprehensible limits of space where dwells the being without beginning and without end, the unwearying source of all existences, leading them all forever to itself. Consider the microcosm, the little world. It’s the reduced and visible image of the macrocosm, the great world, which is beyond our judgments in its immensity. That’s a comparison that will help you understand this idea much better—if you do understand it, that is. For God, or the unknown power which holds the place of that profound and elusive abstraction—I beg you to pay careful attention!—God, as I was saying, planned to imprint intelligibly the imperfect image of this immense cycle of production, absorption, purification, and reproduction, to imprint this cycle which begins, ends, and begins again eternally in him, upon the perpetually stirring function of the Ocean, which produces, absorbs, purifies, and reproduces forever the waters flowing from it. Well, this resemblance is really too clear for me to have to explain the metaphor to you.”

“But the lunatics, monsieur,” said Daniel, neatly depositing my coat on my desk.

“I’m getting there, Daniel. The lunatics you mention would occupy, as I see it, the highest degree in the chain which separates our planet from its satellite. And they necessarily communicate from that high degree with the intelligences of a world unknown to us, so it’s natural enough that we don’t understand them. And it’s absurd to conclude that their ideas lack sense and lucidity, because they belong to an order of sensations and reasoning quite inaccessible to our education and habits. Have you ever seen primitive Eskimos, Daniel?”

“There were two on Captain Parry's ship.”

“Did you speak to those Eskimos?”

“How could I speak to them? I don’t know their language.”

“Suppose you had suddenly received the gift of tongues, by intuition, like Adam, or by inspiration, like the Savior’s companions, or by any other mental phenomenon, like a member of the Academy of Written Languages and Creative Writing—what would you have said to the Eskimos?”

“What could I have said to them? We don't have anything in common, the Eskimos and me.”

“Well said. I have only one more question for you. Do you believe that those Eskimos think and reason?”

“I believe it,” said Daniel, “just as I believe that this is a brush, and that is monsieur’s frock coat which I just folded on the desk.”

“Very well,” I cried, clapping my hands, “but if you believe that the Eskimos think and reason, although you don’t understand them at all—now what will you tell me about lunatics?”

“I will tell you, monsieur,” Daniel answered intrepidly, “that the lunatic asylum in Glasgow is certainly the finest in Scotland, and, therefore, in the whole world.”

I don't know, reader, if you have ever experienced a crueler disappointment than that of my friend Fearful des Farfallas, Bachelor of Arts. He spent the whole of a rainy night playing little cantatas on his mandolin, under the window of a beauty richly dressed in the French style—but it never opened! And he didn't realize until daybreak that it was a mannequin, which Pedrilla had just bought in Paris for her fashion shop.

I felt something similar at Daniel’s response, which demonstrated clearly that my philosophical inductions were neither more nor less intelligible to him than the language of Captain Parry's Eskimos.

But I consoled myself with the thought that there was an irresistible argument in favor of my theory of lunatics. And you doubtless know by experience that nothing imprints an impulse more vividly on the mind than the satisfaction it gives in itself.

What does it matter where I live, I thought to myself, so long as I bring with me pleasant ideas and agreeable fantasies, to keep that adaptable game playing on inside me, that perfectly balanced game of the agents of life, that warm, regular temperature of the blood, that unchanging harmony of action and function which is vulgarly called health?

“Daniel,” I said aloud, “you were born in Glasgow, my lad?”

“In Cannongate, monsieur, five or six houses down from Jervis the bailiff's.”

“You left in Glasgow some young mistress in a red or black cloak, with bare feet whiter than alabaster, and an eye as bold and alert as a falcon, the friends of your childhood, your relatives, your old mother, perhaps.”

Daniel answered me with a shake of his head, but I didn’t want to take notice of it.

“You remember the games on the green banks of the Clyde, and the echoing noise of the hammers in High Street, and the serious solemnities of the old church! Listen, Daniel, we'll go to Glasgow, and I’ll see your lunatics.”

“We’ll go to Glasgow!” cried Daniel, drunk with joy.

“We’ll leave at six this evening,” I went on, setting my watch. “I always take the precaution, in this land of complete liberty where we are, of having a passport and a road-pass. So all I have to get is the horses. As I don’t know the way there, be sure to announce that I won’t be stopping until we get to 55 degrees, 51 minutes latitude.”

Daniel had left.

Ten days later I got off at the Buckshead Inn, which is at least as good as the Star.