Read Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master Online
Authors: Denis Diderot
Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master (23 page)
JACQUES
: I am saying my prayer.
MASTER
: Do you pray?
JACQUES
: Sometimes.
MASTER
: And what do you say?
JACQUES
: I say: ‘Thou who mad’st the Great Scroll, whatever Thou art, Thou whose finger hast traced the Writing Up Above, Thou hast known for all time what I needed, Thy will be done. Amen.’
MASTER
: Don’t you think you would do just as well if you shut up?
JACQUES
: Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I pray on the off-chance, and no matter what might happen to me I would neither rejoice nor complain if I could keep control of myself. But I am inconsistent and violent and I forget the lessons or the principles of my Captain and laugh and cry like an idiot.
MASTER
: And did your Captain never laugh or cry?
JACQUES
: Rarely… Jeanne brought her daughter to me one morning and addressing me first she said: ‘Monsieur, here you are in a beautiful château where you will be a little better looked after than at your surgeon’s house. In the first days especially you will be wonderfully looked after, but I know servants, I’ve been one long enough. Little by little their zeal wears off, their masters will no longer think of you, and if your illness lasts you will be forgotten, and so completely forgotten that if you took it into your head to die of hunger you would succeed.
‘Listen, Denise,’ she said to her daughter, ‘I want you to visit this good man four times a day, in the morning, at lunch time, at five o’clock and at supper time. I want you to obey him as you would me. That is an order, make sure you obey it.’
MASTER
: Do you know what happened to poor Desglands?
JACQUES
: No, Monsieur, but if the wishes which I made for his prosperity have not been fulfilled it is not for want of their being sincere. It was he who gave me to Commander La Boulaye who died on his way to Malta. And it was Commander La Boulaye who gave me to his elder brother, the Captain, who is now probably dead from the fistula, and it is this Captain who gave me to his youngest brother, the Advocate-General of Toulouse who went mad and was shut up by the family. It was M. Pascal, Advocate-General of Toulouse, who gave me to the Comte de Tourville who preferred to take a
monk’s habit and let his beard grow rather than risk his life. It was the Comte de Tourville who gave me to the Marquise du Belloy who ran away to London with a foreigner. It was the Marquise du Belloy who gave me to one of her cousins who ruined himself with women and went off to the Indies and it was that cousin who gave me to a M. Hérissant, a usurer by profession, who was investing the money of M. de Rusai, doctor of the Sorbonne who placed me with Mlle Isselin whom you were keeping as your mistress and who placed me with you, who will provide me with a crust of bread in my old age, as you promised, if I stay with you.
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And there is not the slightest indication that we will separate. Jacques was made for you and you were made for Jacques.
MASTER
: But Jacques, you went through a large number of houses in a very short time.
JACQUES
: That is true. Sometimes they dismissed me.
MASTER
: Why?
JACQUES
: Because I was born a talker and all those people wanted silence. They are not like you, who would suggest I find another position if I shut up tomorrow. I have got precisely the vice which suits you. But what happened to M. Desglands? Tell me, while I pour myself some more tisane.
MASTER
: You lived in his château and you never heard about his spot?
JACQUES
: No.
MASTER
: That story will be for the road. The other one is short. He made his fortune gambling. Then he attached himself to a woman whom you might have seen in his château, an intelligent woman, but serious, taciturn, unconventional and hard. This woman told him one day: ‘Either you love me better than you love gambling, in which case you will give me your word of honour that you will never gamble again, or you love gambling better than me, in which case you will never speak to me again of love and gamble as much as you want.’
Desglands gave his word of honour that he would never gamble again.
‘No matter how big or small the stakes?’
‘No matter how big or small.’
They had been living together in the château which you know for around ten years when Desglands, having been called to town on business, had the misfortune to meet at his lawyer’s one of his old gambling cronies who dragged him off to dinner in a gambling den, where he lost everything he
owned in a single sitting. His mistress was unyielding. She was rich and gave Desglands a small pension and left him for ever.
JACQUES
: That’s a shame. He was a good man.
MASTER
: How’s the throat?
JACQUES
: Bad.
MASTER
: That’s because you are speaking too much and not drinking enough.
JACQUES
: That’s because I don’t like tisane and I like speaking.
MASTER
: Well then, Jacques, there you are at Desglands’ château, near Denise, and Denise has been authorized by her mother to visit you at least four times a day. The hussy! Prefer a Jacques!
JACQUES
: A Jacques! A Jacques, Monsieur, is a man like any other.
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MASTER
: Jacques, you are wrong. A Jacques is not a man like any other.
JACQUES
: He is sometimes better than another.
MASTER
: Jacques, you are forgetting yourself. Get on with the story of your loves and remember that you are only and will never be anything other than a Jacques.
JACQUES
: When we came across those rogues in the cottage, if Jacques hadn’t been worth a bit more than his master…
MASTER
: Jacques, you are insolent. You are abusing my kindness. If I was foolish enough to raise you from your proper place I can always send you back. Jacques, take your bottle and your pot of tisane and go downstairs.
JACQUES
: You say what you like, Monsieur, I am comfortable here and I will not go downstairs.
MASTER
: I tell you, you will go downstairs.
JACQUES
: I am sure that what you say is wrong. What, Monsieur, after having accustomed me over ten years to live as your equal…
MASTER
: It is my pleasure to put an end to all that.
JACQUES
: After having put up with all my impertinence…
MASTER
: I will suffer it no more.
JACQUES
: After having seated me next to you at table, having called me your friend…
MASTER
: You do not know the meaning of the word ‘friend’ when it is used by a superior to his inferior.
JACQUES
: When everybody knows that your orders aren’t worth a fig unless they have been ratified by Jacques; after your name and mine have become so well linked that one never goes without the other and everyone says: ‘Jacques and his master…’, all of a sudden you take it into your head to separate them. No, Monsieur, it will not be so. It is written up above that as long as Jacques lives, as long as his master lives, and even after they are both dead, people will still say: ‘Jacques and his master’.
MASTER
: And I tell you, Jacques, that you will go downstairs and you will go downstairs immediately because I order you to.
JACQUES
: Monsieur, order me to do anything else if you want me to obey.
Here Jacques’ master got up, took Jacques by the lapels and said gravely: ‘Go downstairs.’
Jacques replied coldly: ‘I will not go downstairs.’
His master shook him hard and said: ‘Go down, you scoundrel, obey me.’
‘Scoundrel if you wish, but the scoundrel will not go downstairs. Listen, Monsieur, what I have in my head, as they say, I have in my heels. You are losing your temper for nothing. Jacques is staying where he is and will not go downstairs.’
And then Jacques and his master, who had been restrained up to this point, both lost control at the same time and started shouting.
‘You will go down!’
‘I will not go down!’
‘You will go down!’
‘I will not go down!’
At this noise their hostess came up to see what it was all about but she didn’t get an answer straight away since they carried on shouting.
‘You will go down.’
‘I will not go down.’
Then the master, with heavy heart, stalked up and down the room grumbling: ‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’
The hostess, who was standing there in amazement, said: ‘Messieurs, what’s going on?’
Jacques did not move but said to the hostess: ‘It’s my master. He’s gone off his head. He’s mad.’
MASTER
: Soft, you mean.
JACQUES
: If you say so.
MASTER
(to hostess)
: Did you hear that?
HOSTESS
: He’s wrong, but peace, peace. Speak, one of you or the other, and let me know what it’s all about.
MASTER
(to Jacques): Speak, you scoundrel.
JACQUES
(to master): Speak yourself.
HOSTESS
(to Jacques): Come along, Monsieur Jacques, speak. Your master has ordered you to and after all a master is a master.
Jacques explained the thing to their hostess. When she had heard it the hostess said: ‘Messieurs, do you agree to accept me as arbitrator?’
JACQUES AND HIS MASTER
(at the same time)
: Willingly, willingly, Madame.
‘And will you promise me on your word of honour to carry out my sentence?’
JACQUES AND HIS MASTER
: On our word of honour.
Then the hostess sat down at table and taking on the grave manner of a magistrate she said: ‘Having heard the declaration of Monsieur Jacques and having considered the facts which would tend to prove that his master is a good, indeed a very good, in fact too good a master, and that Jacques is not a bad servant although sometimes subject to confound absolute and irrecoverable possession with passing and gratuitous concession, I hereby annul the equality which has been established between them by virtue of lapse of time and hereby recreate it simultaneously. Jacques will go downstairs and when he shall have gone downstairs he shall come back up again and there shall revert to him all the prerogatives he has exercised up to this date. His master shall tender his hand to him and shall say to him in friendship: “Hello, Jacques, I am pleased to see you again”, and Jacques will reply: “And I, Monsieur, am delighted to return.” And I forbid this business ever to be discussed by them or the prerogative of master and servant ever to be re-examined by them again. It is our wish that the one shall order and the
other obey, each as best he can, and that there be left between that which the one can and that which the other must the same obscurity as heretofore.’
In finishing this judgement, which she had lifted from some work of that time published on the occasion of a similar quarrel when from one end of the kingdom to the other the entire country could hear the master crying to his servant: ‘You will go down!’, and the servant from his side shouting: ‘I will not go down!’,
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‘Come along,’ she said to Jacques, ‘give me your arm without any more argument.’
Jacques cried out plaintively: ‘It must have been written up above that I would go downstairs.’
The hostess said to Jacques: ‘It is written up above that at the moment when any man takes a master he will go down, rise up, go forward, go backward or stay where he is without his feet ever being free to refuse the orders of his head. Give me your arm and let my order be fulfilled.’
Jacques gave his arm to their hostess but they had hardly passed the threshold of the room when the master threw himself on to Jacques and embraced him. Then he let go of Jacques to embrace the hostess and then both of them together saying: ‘It is written up above that I shall never get rid of that character there and so long as I live he shall be my master and I shall be his servant.’
The hostess added: ‘And as far as one can tell neither of you will be any the worse off.’
After the hostess had calmed their quarrel, which she took for the first of its kind when there had been more than a hundred like it, and reinstated Jacques in his former position, she carried on about her business and the master said to Jacques: ‘Now that we have calmed down and are in a state where we can make clear judgements, will you not acknowledge it?’
JACQUES
: I will admit that when one has given one’s word of honour one must keep it, and since we gave our judge our word of honour not to come back to this business we must speak no more of it.