[Then he set himself to imitate his man. He placed himself on a chair, his head fixed, his hat coming over his eyebrows, his eyes half-shut, his arms hanging down, moving his jaw up and down like an automaton:] Gloomy, obscure, oracular as destiny itself—such is our patron.
At the other side of the room is a prude who plays at importance, to whom one could bring one’s self to say that she is pretty, because she is pretty, though she has a blemish or two upon her face. Item, she is more spiteful, more conceited, and more silly than a goose. Item, she insists on having wit. Item, you have to persuade her that you believe she has more of it than anybody else in the world. Item, she knows nothing, and she has a turn for settling everything out of hand. Item, you must applaud her decisions with feet and hands, jump for joy, and scream with admiration:—“How fine that is, how delicate, well said, subtly seen, singularly felt! Where do women get that? Without study, by mere force of instinct, and pure light of nature! That is really like a miracle! And then they want us to believe that experience, study, reflection, education, have anything to do with the matter!...” And other fooleries to match, and tears and tears of joy; ten times a day to kneel down, one knee bent in front of the other, the other leg drawn back, the arms extended towards the goddess, to seek one’s desire in her eyes, to hang on her lips, to wait for her command, and then start off like a flash of lightning. Where is the man who would subject himself to play such a part, if it is not the wretch, who finds there two or three times a week the wherewithal to still the tribulation of his inner parts?
I.—I should never have thought you were so fastidious.
He.—I am not. In the beginning I watched the others, and I did as they did, even rather better, because I am more frankly impudent, a better comedian, hungrier, and better off for lungs. I descend apparently in a direct line from the famous Stentor....
[And to give me a just idea of the force of his organ, he set off laughing, with violence enough to break the windows of the coffee-house, and to interrupt the chess-players.]
I.—But what is the good of this talent?
He.—You cannot guess?
I.—No; I am rather slow.
He.—Suppose the debate opened, and victory uncertain; I get up, and, displaying my thunder, I say: “That is as mademoiselle asserts.... That is worth calling a judgment. There is genius in the expression.” But one must not always approve in the same manner; one would be monotonous, and seem insincere, and become insipid. You only escape that by judgment and resource; you must know how to prepare and place your major and most peremptory tones, to seize the occasion and the moment. When, for instance, there is a difference in feeling, and the debate has risen to its last degree of violence, and you have ceased to listen to one another, and all speak at the same time, you ought to have your place at the corner of the room which is farthest removed from the field of battle, to have prepared the way for your explosion by a long silence, and then suddenly to fall like a thunder-clap over the very midst of the combatants. Nobody possesses this art as I do. But where I am truly surprising is in the opposite way—I have low tones that I accompany with a smile, and an infinite variety of approving tricks of face; nose, lips, brow, eyes, all make play; I have a suppleness of reins, a manner of twisting the spine, of shrugging the shoulders, extending the fingers, inclining the head, closing the eyes, and throwing myself into a state of stupefaction, as if I had heard a divine angelic voice come down from heaven; that is what flatters. I do not know whether you seize rightly all the energy of that last attitude. I did not invent it, but nobody has ever surpassed me in its execution. Behold, behold!
I.—Truly, it is unique.
He.—Think you there is a woman’s brain that could stand that?
I.—It must be admitted that you have carried the talent of playing the madman, and of self-debasement, as far as it can possibly be carried.
He.—Try as hard as they will, they will never touch me—not the best of them. Palissot, for instance, will never be more than a good learner. But if this part is amusing at first, and if you have some relish in inwardly mocking at the folly of the people whom you are intoxicating, in the long run that ceases to be exciting, and then after a certain number of discoveries one is obliged to repeat one’s self. Wit and art have their limits. ’Tis only God Almighty and some rare geniuses, for whom the career widens as they advance.
I.—With this precious enthusiasm for fine things, and this facility of genius of yours, is it possible that you have invented nothing?
He.—Pardon me; for instance, that admiring attitude of the back, of which I spoke to you; I regard it as my own, though envy may contest my claim. I daresay it has been employed before: but who has felt how convenient it was for laughing in one’s sleeve at the ass for whom one was dying of admiration! I have more than a hundred ways of opening fire on a girl under the very eyes of her mother, without the latter suspecting a jot of it; yes, and even of making her an accomplice. I had hardly begun my career before I disdained all the vulgar fashions of slipping a billet-doux; I have ten ways of having them taken from me, and out of the number I venture to flatter myself there are some that are new. I possess in an especial degree the gift of encouraging a timid young man; I have secured success for some who had neither wit nor good looks. If all that was written down, I fancy people would concede me some genius.
I.—And would do you singular honour.
He.—I don’t doubt it.
I.—In your place, I would put those famous methods on paper. It would be a pity for them to be lost.
He.—It is true; but you could never suppose how little I think of method and precepts. He who needs a protocol will never go far. Your genius reads little, experiments much, and teaches himself. Look at Cæsar, Turenne, Vauban, the Marquise de Tencin, her brother the cardinal, and the cardinal’s secretary, the Abbé Trublet, and Bouret! Who is it that has given lessons to Bouret? Nobody; ’tis nature that forms these rare men.
I.—Well, but you might do this in your lost hours, when the anguish of your empty stomach, or the weariness of your stomach overloaded, banishes slumber.
He.—I’ll think of it. It is better to write great things than to execute small ones. Then the soul rises on wings, the imagination is kindled; whereas it shrivels in amazement at the applause which the absurd public lavishes so perversely on that mincing creature of a Dangeville, who plays so flatly, who walks the stage nearly bent double, who stares affectedly and incessantly into the eyes of every one she talks to, and who takes her grimaces for finesse, and her little strut for grace; or on that emphatic Clairon, who becomes more studied, more pretentious, more elaborately heavy, than I can tell you. That imbecile of a pit claps hands to the echo, and never sees that we are a mere worsted ball of daintinesses (’Tis true the ball grows a trifle big, but what does it matter?), that we have the finest skin, the finest eyes, the prettiest bill; little feeling inside, in truth; a step that is not exactly light, but which for all that is not as awkward as they say. As for sentiment, on the other hand, there is not one of these stage dames whom we cannot cap.
I.—What do you mean by all that? Is it irony or truth?
He.—The worst of it is that this deuced sentiment is all internal, and not a glimpse of it appears outside; but I who am now talking to you, I know, and know well, that she has it. If it is not that, you should see, if a fit of ill-humour comes on, how we treat the valets, how the waiting-maids are cuffed and trounced, what kicks await our good friend, if he fails in an atom of that respect which is our due. ’Tis a little demon, I tell you, full of sentiment and dignity. Ah, you don’t quite know where you are, eh?
I.—I confess I can hardly make out whether you are speaking in good faith or in malice. I am a plain man. Be kind enough to be a little more outspoken, and to leave your art behind for once....
He.—What is it? why it is what we retail before our little patroness about the Dangeville or the Clairon, mixed up here and there with a word or two to put you on the scent. I will allow you to take me for a good-for-nothing, but not for a fool; and ’tis only a fool, or a man eaten up with conceit, who could say such a parcel of impertinences seriously.
I.—But how do people ever bring themselves to say them?
He.—It is not done all at once, but little by little you come to it. Ingenii largitor venter.
I.—Then hunger must press you very hard.
He.—That may be; yet strong as you may think them, be sure that those to whom they are addressed are much more accustomed to listen to them than we are to hazard them.
I.—Is there anybody who has courage to be of your opinion?
He.—What do you mean by anybody? It is the sentiment and language of the whole of society.
I.—Those of you who are not great rascals must be great fools.
He.—Fools! I assure you there is only one, and that is he who feasts us to cheat him.
I.—But how can people allow themselves to be cheated in such gross fashion? For surely the superiority of the Dangeville and the Clairon is a settled thing.
He.—We swallow until we are full to the throat any lie that flatters us, and take drop by drop a truth that is bitter to us. And then we have the air of being so profoundly penetrated, so true.
I.—Yet you must once, at any rate, have sinned against the principles of art, and let slip, by an oversight, some of those bitter truths that wound; for, in spite of the wretched, abject, vile, abominable part you play, I believe you have at bottom some delicacy of soul.
He.—I! not the least in the world. Deuce take me if I know what I am! In a general way, I have a mind as round as a ball, and a character fresh as a water-willow. Never false, little interest as I have in being true; never true, little interest as I have in being false. I say things just as they come into my head; sensible things, then so much the better; impertinent things, then people take no notice. I let my natural frankness have full play. I never in all my life gave a thought, either beforehand, what to say, or while I was saying it, or after I had said it. And so I offend nobody.
I.—Still that did happen with the worthy people among whom you used to live, and who were so kind to you.
He.—What would you have? It is a mishap, an unlucky moment, such as there always are in life; there is no such thing as unbroken bliss: I was too well off, it could not last. We have, as you know, the most numerous and the best chosen company. It is a school of humanity, the renewal of hospitality after the antique. All the poets who fall, we pick them up; all decried musicians, all the authors who are never read, all the actresses who are hissed, a parcel of beggarly, disgraced, stupid, parasitical souls, and at the head of them all I have the honour of being the brave chief of a timorous flock. It is I who exhort them to eat the first time they come, and I who ask for drink for them—they are so shy. A few young men in rags who do not know where to lay their heads, but who have good looks; a few scoundrels who bamboozle the master of the house, and put him to sleep, for the sake of gleaning after him in the fields of the mistress of the house. We seem gay, but at bottom we are devoured by spleen and a raging appetite. Wolves are not more famishing, nor tigers more cruel. Like wolves when the ground has been long covered with snow, we raven over our food, and whatever succeeds we rend like tigers. Never was seen such a collection of soured, malignant, venomous beasts. You hear nothing but the names of Buffon, Duclos, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot; and God knows the epithets that bear them company! Nobody can have any parts if he is not as stupid as ourselves. That is the plan on which Palissot’s play of The Philosophers has been conceived. And you are not spared in it, any more than your neighbours.
I.—So much the better. Perhaps they do me more honour than I deserve. I should be humiliated if those who speak ill of so many clever and worthy people took it into their heads to speak well of me.
He.—Everybody must pay his scot. After sacrificing the greater animals, then we immolate the others.
I.—Insulting science and virtue for a living, that is dearly-earned bread!
He.—I have already told you, we are without any consistency; we insult all the world, and afflict nobody. We have sometimes the heavy Abbé d’Olivet, the big Abbé Le Blanc, the hypocrite Batteux. The big abbé is only spiteful before he has had his dinner; his coffee taken, he throws himself into an arm-chair, his feet against the ledge of the fireplace, and sleeps like an old parrot on its perch. If the noise becomes violent he yawns, stretches his arms, rubs his eyes, and says: “Well, well, what is it?” “It is whether Piron has more wit than Voltaire.” “Let us understand; is it wit that you are talking about, or is it taste? For as to taste, your Piron has not a suspicion of it.” “Not a suspicion of it?” “No.” And there we are, embarked in a dissertation upon taste. Then the patron makes a sign with his hand for people to listen to him, for if he piques himself upon one thing more than another, it is taste. “Taste,” he says, “taste is a thing....” But, on my soul, I don’t know what thing he said that it was, nor does he.
Then sometimes we have friend Robbé. He regales us with his equivocal stories, with the miracles of the convulsionnaires which he has seen with his own eyes, and with some cantos of a poem on a subject that he knows thoroughly. His verses I detest, but I love to hear him recite them—he has the air of an energumen. They all cry out around him: “There is a poet worth calling a poet!...”
Then there comes to us also a certain noodle with a dull and stupid air, but who has the keenness of a demon, and is more mischievous than an old monkey. He is one of those figures that provoke pleasantries and sarcasms, and that God made for the chastisement of those who judge by appearances, and who ought to have learnt from the mirror that it is as easy to be a wit with the air of a fool as to hide a fool under the air of a wit. ’Tis a very common piece of cowardice to immolate a good man to the amusement of the others; people never fail to turn to this man; he is a snare that we set for the new-comers, and I have scarcely known one of them who was not caught ...
[I was sometimes amazed at the justice of my madman’s observations on men and characters, and I showed him my surprise.] That is, he answered, because one derives good out of bad company, as one does out of libertinism. You are recompensed for the loss of your innocence by that of your prejudices; in the society of the bad, where vice shows itself without a mask, you learn to understand them. And then I have read a little.
I.—What have you read?
He.—I have read, and I read, and I read over and over again Theophrastus and La Bruyère and Molière.
I.—Excellent works, all of them.
He.—They are far better than people suppose; but who is there who knows how to read them?
I.—Everybody does, according to the measure of his intelligence.
He.—No; hardly anybody. Could you tell me what people look for in them?
I.—Amusement and instruction.
He.—But what instruction, for that is the point?
I.—The knowledge of one’s duties, the love of virtue, the hatred of vice.
He.—For my part, I gather from them all that one ought to do, and all that one ought not to say. Thus, when I read the Avare, I say to myself: “Be a miser if thou wilt, but beware of talking like the miser.” When I read Tartufe, I say: “Be a hypocrite if thou wilt, but do not talk like a hypocrite. Keep the vices that are useful to thee, but avoid their tone and the appearances that would make thee laughable.” To preserve thyself from such a tone and such appearances, it is necessary to know what they are. Now these authors have drawn excellent pictures of them. I am myself, and I remain what I am, but I act and I speak as becomes the character. I am not one of those who despise moralists; there is a great deal of profit to be got from them, especially with those who have applied morality to action. Vice only hurts men from time to time; the characteristics of vice hurt them from morning to night. Perhaps it would be better to be insolent than to have an insolent expression. One who is insolent in character only insults people now and again; one who is insolent in expression insults them incessantly. And do not imagine that I am the only reader of my kind. I have no other merit in this respect than having done on system, from a natural integrity of understanding, and with true and reasonable vision, what most others do by instinct. And so their readings make them no better than I am, and they remain ridiculous in spite of themselves, while I am only so when I choose, and always leave them a vast distance behind me; for the same art which teaches me how to escape ridicule on certain occasions teaches me also on certain others how to incur it happily. Then I recall to myself all that the others said, and all that I read, and I add all that issues from my own originality, which is in this kind wondrous fertile.
I.—You have done well to reveal these mysteries to me, for otherwise I should have thought you self-contradictory.
He.—I am not so in the least, for against a single time when one has to avoid ridicule, happily there are a hundred when one has to provoke it. There is no better part among the great people than that of fool. For a long time there was the king’s fool; at no time was there ever the king’s sage, officially so styled. Now I am the fool of Bertin and many others, perhaps yours at the present moment, or perhaps you are mine. A man who meant to be a sage would have no fool, so he who has a fool is no sage; if he is not a sage he is a fool, and perhaps, even were he the king himself, the fool of his fool. For the rest, remember that in a matter so variable as manners, there is nothing absolutely, essentially, and universally true or false; if not that one must be what interest would have us be, good or bad, wise or mad, decent or ridiculous, honest or vicious. If virtue had happened to be the way to fortune, then I should either have been virtuous, or I should have pretended virtue, like other persons. As it was, they wanted me to be ridiculous, and I made myself so; as for being vicious, nature alone had taken all the trouble that was needed in that. When I use the term vicious, it is for the sake of talking your language; for, if we came to explanations, it might happen that you called vice what I call virtue, and virtue what I call vice.
Then we have the authors of the Opéra Comique, their actors and their actresses, and oftener still their managers, all people of resource and superior merit. And I forget the whole clique of scribblers in the gazettes, the Avant Coureur, the Petites Affiches, the Année littéraire, the Observateur littéraire.
I.—The Année littéraire, the Observateur littéraire! But they detest one another.
He.—Quite true, but all beggars are reconciled at the porringer. That cursed Observateur littéraire, I wish the devil had had both him and his sheet! It was that dog of a miserly priest who caused my disaster. He appeared on our horizon for the first time; he arrived at the hour that drives us all out of our dens, the hour for dinner. When it is bad weather, lucky the man among us who has a shilling in his pocket to pay for a hackney-coach! He is free to laugh at a comrade for coming besplashed up to his eyes and wet to the skin, though at night he goes to his own home in just the same plight. There was one of them some months ago who had a violent brawl with the Savoyard at the door. They had a running account; the creditor insisted on being paid, and the debtor was not in funds, and yet he could not go upstairs without passing through the hands of the other.
Dinner is served; they do the honours of the table to the abbé—they place him at the upper end. I come in and see this. “What, abbé, you preside? That is all very well for to-day, but to-morrow you will come down, if you please, by one plate; the day after by another plate, and so on from plate to plate, now to right and now to left, until from the place that I occupied one time before you, Fréron once after me, Dorat once after Fréron, Palissot once after Dorat, you become stationary beside me, poor rascal as you are—che siedo sempre come”—[an Italian proverb not to be decently reproduced].
The abbé, who is a good fellow, and takes everything in good part, bursts out laughing; Mademoiselle, struck by my observation and by the aptness of my comparison, bursts out laughing; everybody to right and left burst out laughing, except the master of the house, who flies into a huff, and uses language that would have meant nothing if we had been by ourselves—
“Rameau, you are an impertinent.”
“I know I am, and it is on that condition that I was received here.”
“You are a scoundrel.”
“Like anybody else.”
“A beggar.”
“Should I be here, if I were not?”
“I will have you turned out of doors.”
“After dinner I will go of my own will.”
“I recommend you to go.”
We dined: I did not lose a single toothful. After eating well and drinking amply, for after all Messer Gaster is a person with whom I have never sulked, I made up my mind what to do, and I prepared to go; I had pledged my word in presence of so many people that I was bound to keep it. For a considerable time I hunted up and down the room for my hat and cane in every corner where they were not likely to be, reckoning all the time that the master of the house would break out into a new torrent of injuries, that somebody would interpose, and that we should at last make friends by sheer dint of altercation. I turned on this side and that, for I had nothing on my heart; but the master, more sombre and dark-browed than Homer’s Apollo as he lets his arrows fly among the Greeks, with his cap plucked farther over his head than usual, marched backwards and forwards up and down the room. Mademoiselle approaches me: “But, mademoiselle,” say I, “what has happened beyond what happens every day? Have I been different from what I am on other days?”
“I insist on his leaving the house.”—“I am leaving.... But I have given no ground of offence.”—“Pardon me; we invite the abbé and....” It was he who was wrong to invite the abbé, while at the same time he was receiving me, and with me so many other creatures of my sort.—“Come, friend Rameau, you must beg the abbé’s pardon.”—“I shall not know what to do with his pardon.”—“Come, come, all will be right.”—They take me by the hand, and drag me towards the abbé’s chair; I look at him with a kind of admiring wonder, for who before ever asked pardon of the abbé? “All this is very absurd, abbé; confess, is it not?” And then I laugh, and the abbé laughs too. So that is my forgiveness on that side; but I had next to approach the other, and that was a very different thing. I forget exactly how it was that I framed my apology.—“Sir, here is the madman....”—“He has made me suffer too long; I wish to hear no more about him.”—“He is sorry.”—“Yes, I am very sorry.”—“It shall not happen again.”—“Until the first rascal....”—I do not know whether he was in one of those days of ill-humour when mademoiselle herself dreads to go near him, or whether he misunderstood what I said, or whether I said something wrong: things were worse than before. Good heavens, does he not know me? Does he not know that I am like children, and that there are some circumstances in which I let anything and everything escape me? And then, God help me, am I not to have a moment of relief? Why, it would wear out a puppet made of steel, to keep pulling the string from night to morning, and from morning to night! I must amuse them, of course, that is the condition; but I must now and then amuse myself. In the midst of these distractions there came into my head a fatal idea, an idea that gave me confidence, that inspired me with pride and insolence: it was that they could not do without me, and that I was indispensable.
I.—Yes, I daresay that you are very useful to them, but that they are still more useful to you. You will not find as good a house every day; but they, for one madman who falls short, will find a hundred to take his place.
He.—A hundred madmen like me, sir philosopher; they are not so common, I can tell you! Flat fools—yes. People are harder to please in folly than in talent or virtue. I am a rarity in my own kind, a great rarity. Now that they have me no longer, what are they doing? They find time as heavy as if they were dogs. I am an inexhaustible bagful of impertinences. Every minute I had some fantastic notion that made them laugh till they cried; I was a whole Bedlam in myself.
I.—Well, at any rate you had bed and board, coat and breeches, shoes, and a pistole a month.
He.—That is the profit side of the account; you say not a word of the cost of it all. First, if there was a whisper of a new piece (no matter how bad the weather), one had to ransack all the garrets in Paris, until one had found the author; then to get a reading of the play, and adroitly to insinuate that there was a part in it which would be rendered in a superior manner by a certain person of my acquaintance.—“And by whom, if you please?”—“By whom? a pretty question! There are graces, finesse, elegance.”—“Ah, you mean Mademoiselle Dangeville? Perhaps you know her?”—“Yes, a little; but ’tis not she.”—“Who is it, then?”—I whispered the name very low. “She?”—“Yes, she,” I repeated with some shame, for sometimes I do feel a touch of shame; and at this name you should have seen how long the poet’s face grew, if indeed he did not burst out laughing in my face. Still, whether he would or not, I was bound to take my man to dine; and he, being naturally afraid of pledging himself, drew back, and tried to say “No, thank you.” You should have seen how I was treated, if I did not succeed in my negotiation! I was a blockhead, a fool, a rascal; I was not good for a single thing; I was not worth the glass of water which they gave me to drink. It was still worse at their performance, when I had to go intrepidly amid the cries of a public that has a good judgment of its own, whatever may be said about it, and make my solitary clap of the hand audible, draw every eye to me, and sometimes save the actress from hisses, and hear people murmur around me—“He is one of the valets in disguise belonging to the man who.... Will that knave be quiet?” They do not know what brings a man to that; they think it is stupidity, but there is one motive that excuses anything.
I.—Even the infraction of the civil laws.
He.—At length, however, I became known, and people used to say: “Oh, it is Rameau!” My resource was to throw out some words of irony to save my solitary applause from ridicule, by making them interpret it in an opposite sense.
Now agree that one must have a mighty interest to make one thus brave the assembled public, and that each of these pieces of hard labour was worth more than a paltry crown? And then at home there was a pack of dogs to tend, and cats for which I was responsible. I was only too happy if Micou favoured me with a stroke of his claw that tore my cuff or my wrist. Criquette is liable to colic; ’tis I who have to rub her. In old days mademoiselle used to have the vapours; to-day, it is her nerves. She is beginning to grow a little stout; you should hear the fine tales they make out of this.
I.—You do not belong to people of this sort, at any rate?
I.—Because it is indecent to throw ridicule on one’s benefactors.
He.—But is it not worse still to take advantage of one’s benefits to degrade the receiver of them?
I.—But if the receiver of them were not vile in himself, nothing would give the benefactor the chance.
He.—But if the personages were not ridiculous in themselves they would not make subjects for good tales. And then, is it my fault if they mix with rascaldom? Is it my fault if, after mixing themselves up with rascaldom, they are betrayed and made fools of? When people resolve to live with people like us, if they have common sense, there is an infinite quantity of blackness for which they must make up their minds. When they take us, do they not know us for what we are, for the most interested, vile, and perfidious of souls. Then if they know us, all is well. There is a tacit compact that they shall treat us well, and that sooner or later we shall treat them ill in return for the good that they have done us. Does not such an agreement subsist between a man and his monkey or his parrot?... If you take a young provincial to the menagerie at Versailles, and he takes it into his head for a freak to push his hands between the bars of the cage of the tiger or the panther, whose fault is it? It is all written in the silent compact, and so much the worse for the man who forgets or ignores it. How I could justify by this universal and sacred compact the people whom you accuse of wickedness, whereas it is in truth yourselves whom you ought to accuse of folly.... But while we execute the just decrees of Providence on folly, you who paint us as we are, you execute its just decrees on us. What would you think of us, if we claimed, with our shameless manners, to enjoy public consideration? That we are out of our senses. And those who look for decent behaviour from people who are born vicious and with vile and bad characters—are they in their senses? Everything has its true wages in this world. There are two Public Prosecutors, one at your door, chastising offences against society; nature is the other. Nature knows all the vices that escape the laws. Give yourself up to debauchery, and you will end with dropsy; if you are crapulous, your lungs will find you out; if you open your door to ragamuffins, and live in their company, you will be betrayed, laughed at, despised. The shortest way is to resign, one’s self to the equity of these judgments, and to say to one’s self: That is as it should be; to shake one’s ears and turn over a new leaf, or else to remain what one is, but on the conditions aforesaid....
I.—You cannot doubt what judgment I pass on such a character as yours?
He.—Not at all; I am in your eyes an abject and most despicable creature; and I am sometimes the same in my own eyes, though not often: I more frequently congratulate myself on my vices than blame myself for them; you are more constant in your contempt.
I.—True; but why show me all your turpitude?
He.—First, because you already know a good deal of it, and I saw that there was more to gain than to lose, by confessing the rest.
I.—How so, if you please?
He.—It is important in some lines of business to reach sublimity; it is especially so in evil. People spit upon a small rogue, but they cannot refuse a kind of consideration to a great criminal; his courage amazes you, his atrocity makes you shudder. In all things, what people prize is unity of character.
I.—But this estimable unity of character you have not quite got: I find you from time to time vacillating in your principles; it is uncertain whether you get your wickedness from nature or study, and whether study has brought you as far as possible.
He.—I agree with you, but I have done my best. Have I not had the modesty to recognise persons more perfect in my own line than myself. Have I not spoken to you of Bouret with the deepest admiration? Bouret is the first person in the world for me.
I.—But after Bouret you come.
He.—No.
I.—Palissot, then?
He.—Palissot, but not Palissot alone.
I.—And who is worthy to share the second rank with him?
He.—The Renegade of Avignon.
I.—I never heard of the Renegade of Avignon, but he must be an astonishing man.
He.—He is so, indeed.
I.—The history of great personages has always interested me.
He.—I can well believe it. This hero lived in the house of a good and worthy descendant of Abraham, promised to the father of the faithful in number equal to the stars in the heavens.
I.—In the house of a Jew?
He.—In the house of a Jew. He had at first surprised pity, then goodwill, then entire confidence, for that is how it always happens: we count so strongly on our kindness, that we seldom hide our secrets from anybody on whom we have heaped benefits. How should there not be ingrates in the world, when we expose this man to the temptation of being ungrateful with impunity? That is a just reflection which our Jew failed to make. He confided to the renegade that he could not conscientiously eat pork. You will see the advantage that a fertile wit knew how to get from such a confession. Some months passed, during which our renegade redoubled his attentions; when he believed his Jew thoroughly touched, thoroughly captivated, thoroughly convinced that he had no better friend among all the tribes of Israel ... now admire the circumspection of the man! He is in no hurry; he lets the pear ripen before he shakes the branch; too much haste might have ruined his design. It is because greatness of character usually results from the natural balance between several opposite qualities.
I.—Pray leave your reflections, and go straight on with your story.
He.—That is impossible. There are days when I cannot help reflecting; ’tis a malady that must be allowed to run its course. Where was I?
I.—At the intimacy that had been established between the Jew and the renegade.
He.—Then the pear was ripe.... But you are not listening; what are you dreaming about?
I.—I am thinking of the curious inequality in your tone, now so high, now so low.
He.—How can a man made of vices be one and the same?... He reaches his friend’s house one night, with an air of violent perturbation, with broken accents, a face as pale as death, and trembling in every limb. “What is the matter with you?”—“We are ruined.” “Ruined, how?”—“Ruined, I tell you, beyond all help.”—“Explain.”—“One moment, until I have recovered from my fright.”—“Come, then, recover yourself,” says the Jew.... “A traitor has informed against us before the Holy Inquisition, you as a Jew, me as a renegade, an infamous renegade....” Mark how the traitor does not blush to use the most odious expressions. It needs more courage than you may suppose to call one’s self by one’s right name; you do not know what an effort it costs to come to that.
I.—No, I daresay not. But “the infamous renegade——”
He.—He is false, but his falsity is adroit enough. The Jew takes fright, tears his beard, rolls on the ground, sees the officers at his door, sees himself clad in the Sanbenito, sees his auto-da-fè all made ready. “My friend,” he cries, “my good, tender friend, my only friend, what is to be done?”
“What is to be done? Why show ourselves, affect the greatest security, go about our business just as we usually do. The procedure of the tribunal is secret but slow; we must take advantage of its delays to sell all you have. I will hire a boat, or I will have it hired by a third person—that will be best; in it we will deposit your fortune, for it is your fortune that they are most anxious to get at; and then we will go, you and I, and seek under another sky the freedom of serving our God, and following in security the law of Abraham and our own consciences. The important point in our present dangerous situation is to do nothing imprudent.”
No sooner said than done. The vessel is hired, victualled, and manned, the Jew’s fortune put on board; on the morrow, at dawn, they are to sail, they are free to sup gaily and to sleep in all security; on the morrow they escape their prosecutors. In the night, the renegade gets up, despoils the Jew of his portfolio, his purse, his jewels, goes on board, and sails away. And you think that this is all? Good: you are not awake to it. Now when they told me the story, I divined at once what I have not told you, in order to try your sagacity. You were quite right to be an honest man; you would never have made more than a fifth-rate scoundrel. Up to this point the renegade is only that; he is a contemptible rascal whom nobody would consent to resemble. The sublimity of his wickedness is this, that he was himself the informer against his good friend the Israelite, of whom the Inquisition took hold when he awoke the next morning, and of whom a few days later they made a famous bonfire. And it was in this way that the renegade became the tranquil possessor of the fortune of the accursed descendant of those who crucified our Lord.
I.—I do not know which of the two is most horrible to me—the vileness of your renegade, or the tone in which you speak of it.
He.—And that is what I said: the atrocity of the action carries you beyond contempt, and hence my sincerity. I wished you to know to what a degree I excelled in my art, to extort from you the admission that I was at least original in my abasement, to rank me in your mind on the line of the great good-for-noughts, and to hail me henceforth—Vivat Mascarillus, fourbum imperator!