Joseph Balsamo (74 page)
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offered to us, I remember, were sweet, playful, curly-headed little things.”
“Ah, yes ‘ said Balsamo ; but, unfortunately, my dear master, we are not in Congo.*’
” Oh, we are not in Congo ? ” said Althotas, ” and where are we, then ? “
“In Paris.”
” In Paris ? Well, if we were to embark from Mar-seilles, we could be in Congo in six weeks.”
” Yes, no doubt. But I am obliged to remain in France.”
” You are obliged to remain in France ? And why so, may I ask?”
” Because I have business here.”
” Business ? “
“Yes important business.”
The old man burst into a prolonged and ghastly laugh.
” Business ! ” said he, ” business in France ! True, I forgot, you have your clubs to organize ! “
“Yes, master.”
” Conspiracies to set on foot ? “
“Yes, master.”
” And you call that business ? ” And the aged man again commenced to laugh, with an air of mockery and sarcasm. Balsamo remained silent, collecting his forces for the storm which was brewing, and which he felt approach.
” Well, and how is this business of yours getting on ? ” said the old man, turning with difficulty in his chair, and fixing his large gray eyes on his pupil.
Balsamo felt his glance pierce him like a ray of light.
“How far have I advanced ?” asked he.
” Yes.”
” I have thrown the first stone and the waters are troubled.”
“Troubled ? And what slime have you stirred up eh ? “
“The best the slime of philosophy.”
” Oh ! so you are setting to work with your Utopias,
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your baseless visions, your fogs and mists ! Fools ! Ye discuss the existence or non-existence of God, instead of trying, like me, to make gods of yourselves. And who are these famous philosophers with whom you are connected ? Let me hear.”
” I have already gained over the greatest poet and the greatest atheist of the age. He is soon expected in France, whence he has been in a manner exiled, and he is to be made a freemason at the lodge which I have established in the old monastery of the Jesuits, in the Rue Pot-de-Fer. “
” What is his name ? “
” Yoltaire.”
” I never heard of him. Well, who else have you ?”
” I am very soon to have a conference with the man who has done more to overturn established ideas than any other in this age the man who wrote ‘ Le Contrat Social.’”
” What is he called ? “
” Rousseau.”
” I never heard of him.”
“Very probably, as you read only Alphonso the Tenth, Raymond Sully, Peter of Toledo, and Albertus Magnus.”
” They are the only men who really lived, because all their lives they were occupied by that great question to be, or not to be.”
“There are two methods of living, master.”
” I know only one, for my part, viz., to exist. But let us return to your philosophers. You called them, I think “
” Voltaire and Rousseau.”
” Good. I shall remember those names. And you propose by means of these men ‘
” To make myself master of the present, and to undermine the future.”
” Then, it appears the people in this country are very stupid, since they can be led by ideas ? “
“On the contrary, it is because they have too much mind that ideas have more power over them than facts. Besides, I have an auxiliary more powerful than all the philosophers on earth.”
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” What is that ? “
” Love of change. It is now some sixteen hundred years since monarchy was established in France, and the people are wearied of it.”
” So that you think they will overthrow it.”
” I am sure of it.”
“And you would help them to begin the work ? “
*’ Aye ! With all my strength.”
“Fool!”
“How so ?”
“What will you gain by the overthrow of this monarchy ? “
“I? Nothing. But the people will gain happiness.”
” Come, as I am satisfied with what I have done to-day, I am willing to waste a little time on you. Explain, then, first, how you are to attain this happiness, and afterward what happiness is.”
” How am I to attain it ?”
” Yes ; to this universal happiness of yours, or to the overthrow of the monarchy, which in your eyes seems to be the same thing.”
” Well, there exists at this moment a ministry which is the last rampart of the monarchy, intelligent, industrious, courageous, and which might perhaps maintain this tottering and worn-out machine for twenty years longer but they will assist me to overturn it.”
” Who ? Your philosophers ? “
“No. The philosophers support it, on the contrary.”
” What ! Your philosophers support a ministry which supports a monarchy, to which they themselves are hostile ? What fools these philosophers of yours are ! “
*”’ It is because the prime minister is himself a philosopher.”
” So I understand ; they mean to govern in the per* son of this minister. They are not fools, then ; they are selfish.”
” I do not wish to discuss what they are,” exclaimed Balsamo, who began to get impatient. ” All I know is, that this ministry overturned, every one will cry havoc,
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and let slip the dogs of war on their successors. First, there will be against them the philosophers, then the parliament. The philosophers will blame, the parliament will blame ; the ministry will persecute the philosophers and will dissolve the parliament. Then both mind and mat-ter will combine, and organize a silent league an opposition, obstinate, tenacious, incessant, which will attack, undermine, shake all. Instead of parliaments, judges will be appointed ; these judges, nominated by the king, will move heaven and earth in defense of royalty. They will be accused, and with truth, of venality, of connivance, of in justice. The nation will arise, and then the monarchy will have against it the philosophers that is, mind ; the parliament that is, the middle class ; the people that is, the lever which Archimedes sought, and with which he could have raised the world.”
“Well, when you have raised the world, you can only let it fall back into its old place ‘
11 Yes ; but in falling back it will crush the monarchy to atoms.”
“And when the monarchy is crushed to atoms to adopt your false metaphors and inflated language what will arise on its ruins ? “
” Liberty ! “
” Ah ! the French will then be free ? “
” They cannot fail to be so soon.”
“All free?”
” All.”
” There will then be in France thirty millions of free men ? “
“Yes.”
“And among those thirty millions of free men, has it never occurred to you that there might be one, with a little more brains than the rest, who, some fine morning, will seize on the liberty of the twenty-nine millions nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, in order that he might have a little more liberty himself. You remember that dog we had at Medina, who ate up what was intended for all the other dogs ? “
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” Yes ; bnt you may remember also that one day the others combined together and strangled him ? “
” Because they were dogs ; in such a case men would have done nothing.”
” Then you place man’s intelligence below that of the dog, master ?”
” All examples prove it.”
” What examples ? “
” I think you may recall among the ancients a certain Caesar Augustus, and among the moderns a certain Oliver Cromwell, who bit rather deeply into the Roman cake and the English cake, without any great resistance having been offered by those from whom they snatched it.”
” Well, and supposing that the man of whom you speak should arise, he will be mortal, he will die ; and before dying he will have done good even to those whom he may have oppressed ; for he will have changed the nature of the aristocracy. Being obliged to lean for support on something, he will choose that which is strongest the people. Instead of an equality which degrades, he will establish an equality which elevates ; for equality has no fixed range ; it adapts itself to the level of him who makes it. Now, in elevating the people in the social scale he will have introduced a principle unknown until his time. A revolution will make the French free ; a protectorate under another Caesar Augustus, or another Oliver Cromwell, will make them equal.”
Althotas wheeled round in his armchair.
“Oh, the stupidity of man !” he cried. “Busy yonr-self for twenty years in educating a child teach him all that you know that at thirty he may come and tell you : ‘Men will be equal “
” Certainly men will be equal equal before the law.”
“And before death, fool before death, that law of laws, will they be equal, when one shall die at three days old and another at one hundred years ? Equal ? Men equal as long as they are subject to death ? Oh, fool ! thrice sodden fool ! “
And Althotas threw himself back in his chair to laugh
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at ease, while Balsamo, grave and sad, sat with his head leaning on his hand.
The old man at length turned a look of pity on him.
” Am I,” said he, ” the equal of the workman who munches his coarse bread ? of the sucking babe ? of the driveling old man sunk in second childhood ? Wretched sophist that you are ! Men can be equal only when they are immortal ; for, when immortal, they will be gods, and gods alone are on an equality with one another.”
” Immortal ! ” murmured Balsamo. Immortal ! ‘Tis a chimera.”
“A chimera ? Yes ; a chimera like steam a chimera like the electric fluid a chimera like everything which is sought which is not yet discovered, but which will be discovered. Kake up the dust of bygone worlds, lay bare one after another the superincumbent strata, each of which represents a social state now passed away, and in these human strata in this detritus of kingdoms in these slimy deposits of time, into which modern investigation has pierced like an iron plowshare what do you. read ? Is it not that men have, in all ages, sought what I seek, under the various names of the highest good, human happiness, perfection ? When did they not seek it ? They sought it in the days of Homer, when men lived two hundred years they sought it in the days of the patriarchs, when they lived “eight centuries. They did not find that highest good, that well-being, that perfection ; for, if they had, this decrepit world would now be fresh, youthful, roseate as the morning dawn. Instead of that we have suffering, death, decay. Is suffering good ? Is death lovely ? Is decay fair to look upon ? “
Here the old man was interrupted by his short, dry cough, and Balsamo had a moment to reply.
” You acknowledge,” said he, ” that no one has yet discovered that elixir of life which you seek. I tell you that no one will ever discover it. Submit to God.”
” Fool ! No one has discovered it, therefore no one will discover it ? By that mode of reasoning we should never have made any discoveries. But do you think that
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all discoveries are new things, inventions ? Far from it ; they are forgotten things found again. “Why should things, once found, be forgotten ? Because life is too short for the discoverer to draw from his discovery all the deductions which belong to it. Twenty times has man been on the point of grasping the elixir of life. Do you think that the Styx was merely a dream of Homer’s ? Do you think that Achilles, almost immortal, because vulnerable in his heel alone, was a fable ? No ; Achilles was the pupil of Chiron, as you are my pupil. That word Chiron means either best or worst. Chiron was a sage whom they have depicted as a Centaur, because by his learning he had endowed man with the strength and swiftness of the horse. Well, like me, he had almost found the elixir of immortality ! Perhaps, like me, he wanted only three drops of blood. The want of those three drops of blood rendered Achilles vulnerable in his heel ; death found a passage it entered. Well, what have you to say to that ? “
“I say,” replied Balsamo, visibly shaken, “that I have my task and you have yours ; let each fulfil his own at his own personal risk and danger. I will not second yours by a crime ‘
“By a crime ?”
“Yes; and by such a crime as would raise a whole people with cries of indignation in pursuit of you a crime which would cause you to hang on one of those infamous gibbets from which your science has not secured the best men any more than the worst.”
Althotas struck the marble table with his dry and flesh-less hands.
” Come,” said he, “be not a humane idiot the worst race of idiots which exist in the world ! Let us just converse a little on these laws of yours these brutal and ab-surd laws, written by animals of your species who shudder at a drop of blood shed for a wise purpose, but gloat over torrents of the vital fluid shed on scaffolds, before the ramparts of cities, or on those plains which they call fields of battle ! Your laws, ignorant and selfish, sacrificing the
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future generation to the present, and which have taken for their motto, * Live to-day, for to-morrow we die ! ‘ Let us speak of them, I say.”
” Say what you have to say I am listening,” said Balsamo, becoming more and more gloomy.
” Have you a pencil ? I wish you to make a little calculation.”
” I can calculate without pen or pencil ; proceed with what you have to say.”
11 What was this your project was ? Oh, I remember. You are to overturn a ministry, dissolve the parliament, establish venal judges, cause a national bankruptcy, stir up rebellion, kindle a revolution, overturn the monarchy, raise up a protectorate, and hurl down the protector. The revolution is to bring freedom the protectorship equality. Then, the French being free and equal, your task will be accomplished ? Is not that it ?”
” Yes ; do you look on the thing as impossible ? “
”I do not believe in impossibility. You see, I play fairly with you.”
“Well, what then?”
“In the first place, France is not England, where what you wish to do has already been done plagiarist that you are ! France is not an isolated land, where ministers may be dismissed, parliaments dissolved, iniquitous judges established, bankruptcy brought about, revolt fomented, revolution kindled, the monarchy overturned, a protectorship established, and the protector then overthrown, without other nations interfering a little in these movements. France is soldered to Europe as the liver to the frame of man. It has roots in all nations ; its fibers extend through every people. Try to tear up the liver of this great machine which is called the European continent, and for twenty, thirty, forty years perhaps, the whole body will quiver. But I shall take the lowest number, I shall say twenty years. Is that too much, oh, sage philosopher ? “