31/10/2007

Voltaire

Three Tales

1. The Story of Johnny, or The Atheist and the Sage.

2. The White Bull.

3. The Man of Forty Crowns.

Table of Contents

Publication Information:

THE STORY OF JOHNNY; OR, THE ATHEIST AND THE SAGE.

Introduction.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI.

THE WHITE BULL.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI.

Chapter XII.

Notes

Publication Information:

Extracted from Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version. Volume: 2. Translated by William F. Fleming. Publisher: E. R. DuMont. Place of Publication: Paris. Publication Year: 1901

François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire

1. The Story of Johnny, or The Atheist and the Sage.

Histoire de Jenni l' athée et le sage (1775)

2. The White Bull.

Le Taureau blanc (1772)

3. The Man of Forty Crowns.

L' Homme aux quarante écus (1768)

THE STORY OF JOHNNY; OR, THE ATHEIST AND THE SAGE.

Histoire de Jenni l' athée et le sage

(1775)

Introduction.

You request me, sir, to give you some account of our worthy friend, and his singular son. The leisure that the retirement of Lord Peterborough now affords me, places it in my power to oblige you. You will be as astonished as I was, and perhaps adopt my opinion on the subject.

You scarcely knew the young and unfortunate Johnny, Freind’s only son, whom his father took with him to Spain when he received the appointment of chaplain to our armies, in 1705. You started for Aleppo before my lord besieged Barcelona; yet you were right when you said John’s countenance was amiable and interesting, and that he gave proofs of intelligence and courage. It was quite true. Every one who knew him, loved him. At first he was intended for the church; but, as he manifested much aversion for that profession, which, indeed, requires great skill, management, and finesse, his prudent father considered it a folly and a crime to oppose his inclination.

John was not twenty years old when he assisted, as a volunteer, at the attack on Mont-Joui, which was captured, and where the Prince of Hesse lost his life. Our poor Johnny was wounded, taken prisoner, and carried into the town. The following is an account of his adventures from the attack of Mont-Joui till the taking of Barcelona. It is as told by a Catalonian lady, a little too free and too simple. Such stories do not find a way to the hearts of your wise men. I received it from her when I entered Barcelona in the suite of Lord Peterborough. You must read it without offence, as a true description of the manners of the country.

Chapter I.

Adventures Of Johnny, A Young Englishman, Written By Doña Las Nalgas.

When we were informed that the same savages who came through the air to seize on Gibraltar were coming to besiege our beautiful Barcelona, we began to offer prayers at Notre Dame de Manresa assuredly the best mode of defence.

These people, who come from so far, are called by a name very hard to pronounce, that is, English. Our reverend father inquisitor, Don Jeronimo Bueno Caracucarador, preached against these brigands. He anathematized them in Notre Dame d’Elpino. He assured us that the English that they sometimes spoke like men, but invariably made a great hissing; that they were, moreover, notorious heretics; that, though the Blessed Virgin was often indulgent to poor sinners, she never forgave heretics, and that consequently they would all be infallibly exterminated, especially if they presumed to appear before Mont-Joui. He had scarcely finished his sermon when he heard that Mont-Joui was taken by storm.

The same evening we learned that a young Englishman, who had been wounded in the assault, was our prisoner. Throughout the town arose cries of Victory! Victory! And the illuminations were very general.

Doña Boca Vermeja, who had the honour to be the reverend inquisitor’s favourite, was very desirous to see what the English animal and heretic was like. She was my intimate friend. I shared her curiosity. We were obliged to wait till his wound was cured, and this did not take very long.

Soon after, we learned that he was in the habit. of visiting daily at the residence of Elbob, my cousin-german, who, as every one knows, is the best surgeon in the town. My friend Boca Vermeja’s impatience to see this singular monster increased two-fold. We had no rest ourselves, and gave none to our cousin, the surgeon, till he allowed us to conceal ourselves in a small closet, which we entered on tiptoe without saying a word, and scarcely venturing to breathe, just as the Englishman arrived. His face was not turned toward us. He took off a small cap, which enclosed his light hair, which then fell in thick curls down the finest neck I ever beheld. His form presented a plumpness, a finish, an elegance, approaching, in my opinion, the Apollo Belvedere at Rome a copy of which my uncle, the sculptor, possesses.

Doña Boca Vermeja was transported with surprise, and delighted. I shared her ecstasy, and could not forbear exclaiming: “O que hermoso muchacho!”

These words made the young man turn around. We then saw the face of an Adonis on the body of a young Hercules. Doña Boca Vermeja nearly fell backwards at the sight.

“St. James!” she exclaimed, “Holy Virgin! is it possible heretics are such fine men? How we have been deceived about them.”

Doña Boca was soon violently in love with the heretical monster. She is handsomer than I am, I must confess; and I must also confess that I became doubly jealous of her on that account. I took care to show her that to forsake the reverend father inquisitor, Don Jeronimo Bueno Caracucarador, for an Englishman, would be a crime falling nothing short of damnation.

“Ah, my dear Las Nalgas!” she said (Las Nalgas is my name), “I would forsake Melchizedek himself for so fine a young man.”

One of the inquisitors who attended four masses daily, to obtain from Our Lady of Manresa the destruction of the English, heard of our admiration. The Reverend Father Don Caracucarador whipped us both, and had our dear Englishman arrested by twenty-four Alguazils of St. Hermandad. Johnny killed four, and was at length captured by the remaining twenty. He was confined in a very damp cellar, and sentenced to be burnt the following Sunday, in full ceremony, clothed in a san benito, wearing a sugar-loaf cap, in honour of Our Saviour and the Virgin Mary, his mother. Don Caracucarador prepared a fine sermon, but had no occasion for it, as the town was taken at four o’clock on the Sunday morning.

Here Doña Las Nalgas’ tale terminates. This lady was not without a description of wit, which in Spain we call agudeza.

Chapter II.

Continuation Of The Adventures Of John, The Young Englishman; Also Those Of His Worthy Father, D.D., M.P., and F.R.S.

You know the skilful conduct of the Earl of Peterborough after he took Barcelona; how successfully he prevented pillage, restored order, and rescued the Duchess of Popoli from the hands of some drunken Germans, who robbed and abused her. Conceive the surprise, grief, rage, and tears of our friend, Freind, on learning that John was confined in the dungeons of the Holy Inquisition, and condemned to the stake. You know that cold temperaments are frequently most energetic when great events call them into action. You should have seen this distracted father, whom you were accustomed to think imperturbable, fly to the dungeon of his son more rapidly than the horses at Newmarket hasten to the goal. The fifty soldiers who went with him were soon out of breath, and always a hundred paces behind. At length he reached the cell and entered it. What a scene! what tears! what joy! Twenty victims, devoted to the same ceremony, are delivered. All the prisoners take arms and fight with our soldiers. The buildings of the Holy Office are destroyed in ten minutes, and they breakfasted beside the ruins, on the wine and ham of the inquisitors.

In the midst of the roar of cannon, the sound of trumpets and drums, announcing our victory to Catalonia, our friend Freind recovered his accustomed tranquillity of manner. He was as calm as the sky after a day of storm. He was raising to God a heart as serene as his countenance, when he perceived a black spectral figure, clad in a surplice, issue from a vault, and fall at his feet, crying for mercy.

“Who are you?” said our friend. “Do you come from Hades?”

“Almost,” rejoined the other. “I am Don Jeronimo Bueno Caracucarador, inquisitor. I solicit most humbly your forgiveness for wishing to roast your son in public. I took him for a Jew.”

“Supposing that to be the case,” said our friend, with his customary sang-froid, “does it become you, Señor Caracucarador, to roast people alive because they are descended from a sect that formerly inhabited a rocky canton near the Syrian desert? What does it matter to you whether a man is circumcised or not? that he observe Easter at the full of the moon, or on the following Sunday? It is very bad reason to say, ‘That man is a Jew; therefore I must have him burnt, and take his property.’ The Royal Society of London do not reason in that way.

“Do you know, Señor Caracucarador, that Jesus Christ was a Jew that he was born, lived, and died a Jew? that he observed the Passover like a Jew, at the full of the moon? that all his apostles were Jews? that they went to the temple after his death, as we are expressly told? that the first fifteen secret bishops of Jerusalem were Jews? But my son is no Jew; he belongs to the established church. How came it into your head to burn him alive?”

The inquisitor, overawed by the learning of Monsieur Freind, and still prostrate at his feet, replied:

“Alas! sir, we know nothing about this at the University of Salamanca. Forgive me, once more. The true reason is, your son took from me my favourite, Doña Boca Vermeja.”

“Ah! if he took your favourite, that’s another thing. We should never take our neighbour’s goods. That is not, however, a sufficient reason for burning a young man to death. As Leibniz says: ‘The punishment should be in proportion to the crime.’ You Christians on the other side of the British Channel, especially toward the south, make no more of roasting each other, be it the Counsellor Dubourg, M. Servetus, or those who were burned in the reign of Philip II., surnamed El Discrete, than we do of roasting a joint of beef in London. But bring Miss Boca Vermeja before me, that I may learn the truth from her own mouth.”

Boca Vermeja appeared, weeping, looking the handsomer for her tears, as women generally do.

“Is it true, Miss, that you are devotedly attached to M. Caracucarador, and that my son has abducted you?”

“Abducted me? The English gentleman! I never met with any one so amiable and good-looking as your son. You are very fortunate in being his father. I could follow him to the world’s end, I always hated that ugly inquisitor, who whipped me and Mademoiselle Las Nalgas till he nearly brought blood. If you wish to make me happy, you will cause the old fellow to be hanged at my bedroom window.”

Just as Boca Vermeja was thus speaking, the Earl of Peterborough sent for the inquisitor Caracucarador, to have him hanged. You will not be surprised to hear that Mr. Freind firmly opposed this measure.

“Let your just displeasure,” said he, “give way to generous feelings. A man should never be put to death but when it is absolutely necessary for the safety of others. The Spaniards say the English are barbarians, who kill all the priests who come in their way. This might have injured the cause of the archduke, for whom you have taken Barcelona. I have sufficient satisfaction in rescuing my son, and putting it out of the power of this rascally monk to exercise his inquisitorial functions.”

In a word, the wise and charitable Freind was contented with getting Caracucarador flogged, as he had whipped Miss Boca Vermeja and Miss Las Nalgas.

Such clemency affected the Catalonians. The persons rescued from the Inquisition felt that our religion was better than theirs. Nearly all requested to be admitted members of the established church; even some bachelors of the University of Salamanca, who chanced to be at Barcelona, requested instruction. The greater part soon became enlightened, with the exception of a certain Don Inigo y Medroso y Comodios y Papalamiendo, who obstinately adhered to his opinions.

Chapter III.

Summary Of The Controversy Of The “Buts” Between Mr. Freind And Don Inigo Y Medroso Y Comodios Y Papalamiendo, Bachelor Of Salamanca.

The following is a summary of the pleasant disputation, which our dear friend Freind and the Bachelor Don Papalamiendo held, in the presence of the Earl of Peterborough. This familiar conversation was called the dialogue of the Buts. As you read it you will discover why.

THE BACHELOR. But, sir, notwithstanding all the fine things you have said, you must admit that your respectable established church did not exist before the time of Don Luther and Don Oecolampadius; consequently, it is quite new, and can hardly be said to belong to the family.

FREIND. You might as well say I am not a descendant of my grandfather, because another branch of the family, living in Italy, seized on his will, and my claims. I have fortunately found them again, and it is now quite clear that I am my grandfather’s grandson. You and I are, as it were, of the same family, but with this difference: We read our grandfather’s testament in our mother tongue, while you are forbidden to read it in yours. You are the slaves of a foreigner; we listen to the dictates of reason.

THE BACHELOR. But suppose your reason should lead you astray? For, in a word, you have no faith in our University of Salamanca, which has declared the infallibility of the pope, and his indisputable control of the past, the present, the future, and the paulo-post-future.

FREIND. Neither did the apostles. It is written that Peter, who denied his master Jesus, was severely rebuked by Paul. I have not examined the case to see which was in the wrong; perhaps, as is the case in most disputes, neither was right; but I do not find one passage in the Acts of the Apostles to prove that Peter was considered the master of his companions, and of the paulo-postfuture.

THE BACHELOR. But St. Peter was certainly archbishop of Rome, for Sanchez tells us that this great man came there in the reign of Nero, and filled the archbishop’s throne twenty-five years under the same Nero, who only reigned thirteen. Besides, it is a matter of faith, and Don Grillandus, the prototype of the Inquisition, affirms it (for we never read the Holy Bible), that St. Peter was at Rome during a certain year, for he dates one of his letters from Babylon. Now, since Babylon is visibly the anagram of Rome, it is clear that the pope, by divine right, is lord of the world; moreover, all the licentiates of Salamanca have shown that Simon Grace-of-God, first sorcerer and counsellor of state at the court of Nero, sent his compliments by his dog to Simon Barjona, otherwise called St. Peter, as soon as he came to Rome; that St. Peter, who was scarcely less polite, sent also his dog to compliment Simon Grace-of-God, and then they diverted themselves by trying which could soonest raise from the dead a cousin-german of Nero’s; that Grace-of-God only succeeded in effecting a partial restoration, while Barjona won the game by wholly restoring the dead man to life; that Grace-of-God sought to have his revenge by flying through the air like St. Daedalus; and that Barjona broke his legs, by making him fall. On this account St. Peter received the martyr’s crown, being crucified with his heels upward. Therefore we have proved that his holiness, the pope, ought to reign over all who wear crowns; that he is lord of the past, the present, and all the futures in the world.

FREIND. It is clear these things happened in the days when Hercules separated at a stroke the two mountains, Calpe and Abyla, and crossed the straits of Gibraltar in his goblet. But it is not on such histories, however authentic they may be, that we base our religion. We found it on the gospel.

THE BACHELOR. But, sir, on what passages of the gospel? I have read a portion of the gospel in our theological tracts. Do you base it on the descent of the angel to announce to the Virgin Mary that she had conceived by the Holy Ghost? On the journey of the three kings after the star? On the massacre of all the children of the country? On the trouble the devil took to carry God into the wilderness, to place him on a pinnacle of the temple, and on the summit of a mountain from whence he beheld all the kingdoms of the world? On the miracle of water changed into wine at a village wedding? On the miracle of two thousand pigs drowned by the devil in a lake at the command of Jesus? On—?

FREIND. Sir, we respect these things because they are in the gospel; but we never speak of them because they are too far above our weak human reason.

THE BACHELOR. But they say you never call the Holy Virgin, Mother of God?

FREIND. We revere and cherish her. But we think she cares very little for the titles given her in this world. She is never styled the Mother of God in the gospel. In the year 431 there was a great dispute at the council of Ephesus to ascertain if Mary was Theotocos; and if Jesus Christ, being at the same time God and the son of Mary, Mary could at the same time be mother of God the Father and God the Son. We do not enter into these disputes of Ephesus. The Royal Society at London does not concern itself with such controversies.

THE BACHELOR. But, sir, you talk of Theotocos. What may Theotocos mean, if you please?

FREIND. It means ‘Mother of God’. What, are you a bachelor of Salamanca, and don’t understand Greek?

THE BACHELOR. But Greek! Of what use can Greek be to a Spaniard? But, sir, do you believe that Jesus Christ has one nature, one person, and one will; or two natures, two persons and two wills; or, one will, one nature, and two persons; or, two wills, two persons and one nature; or?

FREIND. This, also, belongs to the Ephesian controversy, and does not concern us.

THE BACHELOR. But what does concern you, then? Do you suppose there are only three persons in God, or that there are three Gods in one person? Does the second person proceed from the first person, and the third from the two others, or from the second intrinsecus, or only from the first? Has the father all the attributes of the son except paternity? And does the third person proceed by infusion, by identification, or by spiration?

FREIND. This question is not mooted in the gospel. St. Paul never wrote the name of the Trinity.

THE BACHELOR. But you always refer to the gospel, and never make mention of St. Bonaventura, of Albert the Great, of Tambourini, of Grillandus, of Escobar.

FREIND. Because I do not call myself a Dominican, a Franciscan or a Jesuit. I am satisfied with being a Christian.

THE BACHELOR. But if you are a Christian, tell me if you conscientiously think the rest of mankind will be damned?

FREIND. It does not become me to limit the compassion or the justice of God.

THE BACHELOR. But to come to the point, if you are a Christian, what do you believe?

FREIND. I believe with Jesus Christ that we ought to love God and our neighbour, forgive our enemies, and do good for evil. These are the maxims of Jesus. So true are they, that no legislator, no philosopher, ever had other principles before him, and it is impossible that there can be any other. These truths never have and never can meet with contradiction, save from our passions.

THE BACHELOR. But, in regard to the passions, is it true that your bishops, priests, and deacons are all married?

FREIND. Quite true. St. Joseph, who passed for the father of Jesus, was married. James the Less, surnamed Oblia, brother of our Lord, was his son, who, after the death of Jesus, spent his life in the temple. St. Paul the great St. Paul was a married man.

THE BACHELOR. But Grillandus and Molina assert the contrary.

FREIND. Let them say what they please; I prefer believing St. Paul himself on the subject. In I Corinthians, ix. 4-7, he says: “Have we not power to eat and to drink? Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas? Or I only and Barnabas, have we not power to forbear working? Who goeth a warfare at any time at his own charges? Who planteth a vineyard and eateth not of the fruit thereof?”

THE BACHELOR. But, sir, did St. Paul really say that?

FREIND. Yes, he said that, and very much more.

THE BACHELOR. But, really—that prodigy of the efficacy of grace?

FREIND. It is true, sir, that his conversion was a great miracle. I admit, from the Acts of the Apostles, that he was the most cruel satellite of the enemies of Jesus. The Acts say that he assisted at the stoning of Stephen. He admits himself, that when the Jews condemned to death a follower of Christ, he would see to the execution of the sentence, detuli sententiam. I admit that Abdia, his disciple, and the translator Julius, the African, accused him of putting to death James Oblia, the brother of our Lord; but his persecutions increase the wonder of his conversion, and by no means prevented his having a wife. I assure you he was married. St. Clement of Alexandria expressly declares it.

THE BACHELOR. But St. Paul, then, was a worthy man of God! Really, I am grieved to think he assassinated St. Stephen, and St. James, and I am surprised to find he travelled to the third heaven. But pray continue.

FREIND. We gather from St. Clement of Alexandria that St. Peter had children; one St. Petronilla is mentioned among them. Eusebius, in his “History of the Church,” says that St. Nicholas, one of the first disciples, had a very handsome wife; and that the disciples blamed him for being over-fond and jealous. “Sirs,” said he, “let any one take her who likes; I give her to you.”

In the Jewish economy, which should have lasted forever, but to which, nevertheless, the Christian dispensation succeeded, marriage was not only permitted, but expressly enjoined on priests, since they were always of the same race. Celibacy was considered infamous.

It is certain that celibacy could not have been considered a very pure and honourable state by the first Christians, since we find among the bishops excommunicated by the first councils, chiefly those who oppose the marriage of priests, such as Saturnians, Basilidians, Montanists, Encrasists, and other ans and ists. This accounts for the wife of Gregory of Nazianze bearing another Gregory of Nazianze, and enjoying the inestimable felicity of being at one and the same time the wife and mother of a canonized saint a privilege which even St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine did not enjoy.

By the same reason I might name as many and even more of the ancient bishops who were married, and account for your not having had, in the earlier ages of the church, bishops and popes who indulged in fornication, adultery, and even worse crimes. Things are not so now. This is also the reason why the Greek church, the mother of the Latin church, allows priests to marry. In a word, the reason why I myself am married, and have a son, as fine a fellow as you could wish to see.

Besides, my dear bachelor, have you not in your church seven sacraments which are outward signs of things invisible? Does not a bachelor of Salamanca enjoy the advantage of baptism as soon as he comes into the world; of confirmation as soon as he has committed a few follies or understands those of others; of communion, though a little different from ours, when he is fourteen years of age; of holy orders, when they shave the crown of his head and give him a living of twenty, thirty, or forty thousand piastres; and lastly of extreme unction, when he is ill? Must he then be deprived of the sacrament of marriage, when he is in health? Especially when God united Adam and Eve in marriage: Adam, the first bachelor in the world, since, according to your schools, he had knowledge by infusion; Eve, the first female bachelor, since she tasted the tree of knowledge before her husband.

THE BACHELOR. But, if things are so, I may cease my “buts.” This is certain, I adopt your religion; I will belong to the established church of England; will marry an honest woman, who at least will pretend to love me while I am young, take care of me when I grow old, and whom I will bury decently, should I survive her. I think this is better than roasting men and enticing girls after the fashion of my cousin, Don Caracucarador, the inquisitor of the faith.

This is a faithful summary of the conversation between Mr. Freind and the bachelor Don Papalamiendo, since called by us Papa Dexando. This curious dialogue was drawn up by Jacob Hull, one of my lord’s secretaries.

After this conversation, the bachelor took me aside and said:

“This Englishman, whom I took at first for an anthropophagus, must be a very good man, for he is a theologian and can keep his temper.”

I informed him that Mr. Freind was tolerant, or a Quaker, and a descendant of the daughter of William Penn, who founded Philadelphia. “Quaker, Philadelphia?” he cried, “I never heard of those sects!”

I gave him some information on the subject. He could scarcely believe me. It seemed to him like another universe. And, indeed, he was in the right.

Chapter IV.

John Returns To London And Is Led Into Bad Company.

While our worthy philosopher Freind was enlightening the priests of Barcelona, and his son John delighted the ladies, Lord Peterborough lost all favour with the queen and archduke for seizing Barcelona for them. The courtiers censured him for taking the city contrary to all rule, with an army less strong by half than the garrison. At first the archduke was highly incensed, and our friend was obliged to print an apology for the general. Yet this archduke, who had come to conquer Spain, had not the wherewith to pay for his chocolate. All Queen Anne had given him was squandered.

Montecuculi, in his Memoirs, says three things are necessary to maintain a war: First, money; second, money; and third, money. The archduke wrote from Guadalajara, where he was on the nth of August, 1706, to Lord Peterborough, a long letter signed Yo el Rey, in which he begged him to hasten to Genoa and raise on credit 100,000L. So our Sertorius, from general of an army, thus became a Genoese banker. He communicated his distress to our friend Freind. They started for Genoa. I went with them, for you know my heart leads me thither. I admired the skill and spirit of conciliation my friend displayed in this delicate business. I saw at once that intelligence may meet every exigency. Our great Locke was a physician; he became the first metaphysician in Europe, and restored the value of the British coinage. In three days Freind raised the 100,000L, but the court of Charles the VI. contrived to squander it in three weeks. After this the general, accompanied by his theologian, was obliged to repair to London to justify himself before the parliament for conquering Catalonia against all rule, and for ruining himself in the common cause. The affair was protracted and vexatious, as are all party disputes.

You know that Mr. Freind was a member of parliament before he became a priest, and he is the only person who has been allowed to combine functions so opposed. One day, when Freind was thinking over a speech he intended to deliver in the house (of which he was a most respected member), a Spanish lady was announced as desirous of seeing him on particular business. It was Doña Boca Vermeja herself, in tears. Our good friend ordered a luncheon. She took some refreshment, dried her eyes, and thus began:

“You will remember, sir, when you went to Genoa, you ordered your son John to leave Barcelona for London, and to commence his duties as a clerk in the exchequer, a post which your influence had obtained for him. He embarked in the Triton, with a young bachelor of arts, Don Papa Dexando, and others whom you had converted. You may well suppose that I, with my dear friend Las Nalgas, accompanied them.”

Boca Vermeja then told him, again shedding tears, how John was jealous, or affected to be jealous, of the bachelor; how a certain Madame Clive-Hart, a very bold, spiteful, masculine, young married lady, had enslaved his mind; how he lived with libertines who had no fear of God; how, in a word, he neglected Boca Vermeja for the artful Clive-Hart; and all because Clive-Hart had a little more red and white in her complexion than poor Boca Vermeja.

“I will look into the matter at leisure,” said the worthy Mr. Freind. “I must now attend parliament, to look after Lord Peterborough’s business.”

Accordingly, to parliament he went, where I heard him deliver a firm and concise discourse, free from commonplace epithets and circumlocutions. He never invoked a law or a testimony. He quoted, enforced and applied them. He did not say they had taken the religion of the court by surprise, by accusing Lord Peterborough of exposing Queen Anne’s troops to risk, because it had nothing to do with religion. He did not call a conjecture a demonstration, nor forget his respect to an august parliament, by using common jokes. He did not call Lord Peterborough his client, because client signifies a plebeian protected by a senator. Freind spoke with confidence and modesty; he was listened to in silence, only disturbed by cries of “Hear him! hear him!”

The House of Commons passed a vote of thanks to Earl Peterborough, instead of condemning him. His lordship obtained the same justice from the House of Peers, and prepared to set out with his dear Freind to deliver the kingdom of Spain to the archduke. This did not take place, solely because things do not always turn out as we wish them.

On leaving the house, our first care was to inquire after the health of John. We learned that he was leading a dissipated and debauched life with Mrs. Clive-Hart and a party of young men intelligent, but atheists who believed:

“That man is in no respect superior to the brutes; that he lives and dies as they do; that both spring from and both return to the earth; that wisdom and virtue consist in enjoyment, and in living with those we love, as Solomon says at the end of the ‘Koheleth,’ which we call Ecclesiastes.”

These sentiments were chiefly advanced among them by one Warburton, a very forward, licentious fellow. I have glanced at some of the poor author’s MSS., which, heaven grant, may not one day be printed. Warburton pretends that Moses did not believe in the immortality of the soul, because he never speaks of it, and considers that to be the only proof of his divine mission. This absurd conclusion leads to the supposition that the religion of the Jews is false. Infidels thence argue that ours, being founded thereon, is false also; and ours, which is the best of all, being false, all others are, if possible, still more false; therefore, there is no religion. Hence some conclude that there is no God. Let us add to these conclusions, that this little Warburton is an intriguing, slandering fellow. See what peril! [1]

But worse than all, John was head over ears in debt, and had a strange way of paying. One of his creditors came to him with a claim for a hundred guineas, while we were in the house. John, who always appeared polite and gentle, fought his creditor, and paid him with a sword-wound. It was apprehended the wounded man would die, and John, notwithstanding Lord Peterborough’s protection, ran the risk of imprisonment and hanging.

Chapter V.

They Want To Get John Married.

You remember the anguish of the venerable Freind when he learned that John was in the prison of the inquisition at Barcelona. Imagine his rage when he learned of the debauchery and dissipation of the unfortunate lad, his way of paying debts, and his danger of getting hanged. Yet Freind restrained himself. This excellent man’s self-command is really astonishing. His reason regulates his heart, as a good master rules his servants. He does everything reasonably, and judges wisely with as much celerity as hasty people act rashly.

“This is no time to lecture, John,” said he. “We must snatch him from the precipice.”

You must know that on the day previous our friend had come into a handsome sum, left him by George Hubert, his uncle. He went himself in search of our great surgeon, Cheselden. We found him at home, and then proceeded together to the wounded creditor. The wound was inspected. It was not dangerous. Freind gave the sufferer a hundred guineas as the first step, and fifty others by way of reparation, and then asked forgiveness for his son. Indeed, he expressed his regret so touchingly that the poor man embraced him, and. weeping, wished to return the money.

This sight moved and surprised young Mr. Cheselden, whose reputation is becoming very great, and whose heart is as kind as his hand is skilful.

I was moved, I was beside myself. Never had I admired and loved our friend so much.

On returning home I asked him if he did not intend to send for his son, and to admonish him.

“No,” said he. “Let him feel his faults before I speak of them. Let us sup together to-night. We will see what in honesty I ought to do. Examples correct better than reprimands.”

While waiting for supper, I called on John. I found him in the state which all men experience after their first crime that is, pale, with sunken eyes and hoarse voice agitated, and answering at random when spoken to.

I told him what his father had just done.

He looked at me steadily, then turned away to dash a tear from his eye. I argued well from this, and began to hope that John would yet prove a worthy man. I felt ready to clasp him in my arms, when Madame Clive-Hart came in, accompanied by a wild fellow, called Birton.

“Well,” said the lady, laughing, “have you really killed a man to-day? Some tiresome fellow. ‘Tis well to rid the world of such people. When you are next in the killing mood, pray think of my husband. He plagues me to death.”

I surveyed this woman from head to foot. She was handsome, but there was something sinister in her countenance. John dared not reply, and, confused by my presence, looked downward.

“What’s the matter?” said Birton. “You look as if you had done something wrong. I come to give you absolution. Here is a little book I have just bought at Lintot’s. It proves as clearly as two and two make four that there is neither God, nor vice, nor virtue a very consoling fact! So, let us drink together.”

On hearing this singular discourse, I withdrew quickly, and represented to Mr. Freind how much his son required his advice.

“I see it as clearly as you do,” said this kind father; “but let us begin by paying his debts.”

They were all discharged the next day. John came and threw himself at his father’s feet. Will you believe it? The father made no reproaches. He left him to conscience, only observing: “Remember, my son, there is no happiness apart from virtue.”

Mr. Freind then saw that the bachelor married Boca Vermeja, who really loved him, notwithstanding her tears for John. Women know how to confuse such feelings wonderfully. One would almost say that their hearts are a bundle of contradictions; perhaps because they were originally formed from one of our ribs.

Our generous Freind gave her also a dowry, and took care to secure places for his converts. It is not enough to take care of people’s souls, if we neglect to provide for their present wants.

After performing these good actions, with his astonishing sang-froid, he concluded he had nothing more to do to restore his son to virtue than to marry him to a young person of beauty, virtue, talents, and some wealth. This, indeed, was the only way to wean him from the detestable Clive-Hart, and others, whom he frequented.

I had heard people speak of a Miss Primrose, a young heiress, brought up by her relative, Lady Hervey. The Earl of Peterborough introduced me to Lady Hervey. I saw Miss Primrose, and considered her a proper person to fulfil the wishes of my friend. John, in the midst of his dissipation, had great reverence, and even affection, for his father. He was chiefly affected that his father had never blamed him for his follies. Debts paid without informing him; wise counsels seasonably given, and without reprimand; proofs of friendship given from time to time, yet free from the familiarity which might depreciate them. All this went to John’s heart, for he was both intelligent and sensitive.

Lord Peterborough introduced the father and son to Lady Hervey. I perceived that the extreme beauty of John soon made a favourable impression on Miss Primrose; for I saw her look stealthily at him and blush. John seemed only polite, and Primrose admitted to Lady Hervey that she wished his politeness might become love.

The young man soon discovered the worth of this charming girl, though he was the complete slave of Clive-Hart. He was like the Indian invited to gather celestial fruit, but restrained by the claws of a dragon.

But here the recollection of what I witnessed overwhelms me. Tears moisten my paper. When I recover, I will resume my tale.

Chapter VI.

A Terrible Adventure.

The marriage of John and the lovely Miss Primrose was about to be celebrated. Freind never felt more joy. I shared it. But the occasion was changed into one of deep sorrow and suffering.

Clive-Hart loved John, though constantly faithless. They say this is the lot of those women who, violating modesty, renounce their honour. In particular she deceived John for her dear Birton and for another of the same school. They lived together in debauch, and, what is perhaps peculiar to our nation, they had all of them sense and worth. Unfortunately, they employed their sense against God. Madame Clive-Hart’s house was a rendezvous for atheists. Well for them had they been such atheists as Epicurus, Leontium, Lucretius, Memmius and Spinoza—the most upright man of Holland or Hobbes, so faithful to his unfortunate king, Charles I.

But, however it may be, Clive-Hart, jealous of the pure and gentle Miss Primrose, could not endure the marriage. She devised a vengeance, which I conceive to be unsurpassed even in London, where I believe our fathers have witnessed crimes of every kind. She learned that Miss Primrose, returning from shopping, would pass by her door. She took advantage of the opportunity, and had a sewer opened, communicating with her premises.

Miss Primrose’s carriage, on its return, was obliged to draw up at this obstruction. Clive-Hart goes out, and entreats her to alight and take some refreshment, while the passage is being cleared. This invitation made Miss Primrose hesitate; but she perceived John standing in the hall, and, yielding to an impulse stronger than her discretion, she got out. John offered her his hand. She enters. Clive-Hart’s husband was a silly drunkard, as hateful to his wife as he was submissive and troublesome by his civility. He presents refreshments to the young lady, and drinks after her. Mrs. Clive-Hart takes them away instantly, and brings others. By this time the street is cleared. Miss Primrose enters her carriage, and drives to her mother’s.

She soon falls sick, and complains of giddiness. They suppose it is occasioned by the motion of the carriage. But the illness increased, and the next day she was dying.

Mr. Freind and I hastened to the house. We found the lovely creature pale and livid, a prey to convulsions; her lips open, her eyes glazed, and always staring. Black spots disfigured her face and throat. Her mother had fainted on her bed. Cheselden employed in vain all the resources of his art. I will not attempt to describe Freind’s anguish. It was intense. I hurried to Clive-Hart’s house, and found that the husband was just dead, and that the wife had fled.

I sought John. He could not be found. A servant told me that his mistress had besought him not to leave her in her misfortune, and that they had gone off together, accompanied by Birton, no one knew whither.

Overcome by these rapid and numerous shocks, terrified at the frightful suspicions which haunted me, I hastened to the dying lady.

“Yet,” said I to myself, “if this abominable woman threw herself on John’s generosity, it does not follow that he is an accomplice. John is incapable of so horrible and cowardly a crime, which he had no interest in committing, which deprives him of a charming wife, and renders him odious to the human race. Weak, he has probably allowed himself to yield to a wretch, of whose crime he was ignorant. He did not see, as I have, Miss Primrose dying; he never would have deserted her pillow to accompany the woman who poisoned her. Oppressed by these thoughts, I entered, shuddering, the room which I expected contained a corpse.”

She was still alive. Old Clive-Hart died soon, because his physical strength was worn out by debauchery; but young Miss Primrose was sustained by a constitution as robust as her blood was pure. She saw me, and inquired, in a tender tone, after John. A flood of tears gushed from my eyes. I could not reply. I was unable to speak to the father. I was obliged to leave her to the faithful hands that served her.

We went to inform his lordship of this disaster. He is as kind to his friends as terrible to his foes. Never was there a more compassionate man with so stern a countenance. He took as much pains to assist the dying lady, and to overtake the abandoned woman, and discover John, as he had done to give Spain to the archduke. But all our search proved in vain. I thought it would kill Freind. Now we flew to the residence of Miss Primrose, whose dying was protracted, now to Rochester, Dover, Portsmouth. Couriers were despatched everywhere. We wandered about at random, like dogs that have lost the scent, while the unfortunate mother expected hourly the death of her child.

At length we learned that a handsome lady, accompanied by three young men and some servants, had embarked at Newport, in Monmouthshire, in a little smuggling vessel that was in the roads, and had sailed for North America.

Freind simply sighed at this intelligence; then suddenly recovering himself, and pressing my hand, he said:

“I must go to America.”

I replied, weeping with admiration: “I will not leave you. But what can you do?”

“Restore my only son,” said he, “to virtue and his country, or bury myself with him.”

Indeed, from our information, we could not doubt but he had fled thither with that horrible woman, Birton, and the other villains of the party.

The good father took leave of Lord Peterborough, who returned soon after to Catalonia; and we went to Bristol and freighted a ship for the Delaware and the bay of Maryland.

Freind, knowing these coasts to be in the heart of the English possessions, thought it right to go there, whether his son had sought concealment in the North or South.

He supplied himself with money, letters of credit, and provisions, and left a confidential servant in London, to write to him by ships that were leaving every week for Maryland or Pennsylvania.

We started. The crew, judging from the placid countenance of my friend, thought we were on an excursion of pleasure. But when he was alone with me, his sighs expressed the depth of his anguish. At times I congratulated myself on the happiness of consoling such a noble mind.

A west wind kept us a long time off the Scilly Islands. We were obliged to steer for New England. What inquiries we made on every coast! What time and toil were thrown away! At length, a northeast wind arising, we steered for Maryland. There, it was said, John and his companions had taken refuge.

The fugitives had sojourned on the coast more than a month, and had astonished the whole colony by indulgences in luxury and debauch, till then unknown in that part of the world. Then they disappeared, no one knew where.

We advanced into the bay, intending to go to Baltimore for fresh information.

Chapter VII.

What Happened In America.

On the way we found, to the right, a very handsome house. It was low, but convenient and neat, placed between a spacious barn and a large stable, the whole enclosed by a garden, well stocked with fruits of the country. It belonged to an old man, who invited us to alight at his retreat. He did not look like an Englishman; his accent showed us he was a foreigner. We anchored and went on shore. The old man welcomed us cordially, and gave us the best cheer to be had in the New World. We discreetly insinuated our wish to know to whom we were indebted for so kind a reception.

“1 am,” said he, “of the race you call savages. I was born on the Blue Mountains, which bound this country in the west. In my childhood I was bitten by a rattlesnake, and abandoned. I was on the point of death. The father of the present Lord Baltimore, falling in with me, confided me to his physician, and to him I owe my life. I soon discharged the debt, for I have saved his in a skirmish with the neighbouring tribes. He gave me, in return, this habitation.”

Mr. Freind inquired if he was of Lord Baltimore’s religion.

“How,” said he, “would you have me profess another man’s religion? I have my own.”

This short and energetic answer made us reflect a little.

“You have, then,” said I, “your own law and your own God?”

“Yes,” he replied, with an assurance wholly free from pride. “My God is there,” and he pointed to heaven. “My law is here,” and he put his hand on his breast.

My friend was struck with admiration, and, pressing my hand, he said:

“This simple nature reasons more wisely than all the bachelors with whom we conversed at Barcelona.”

He was anxious to know if he could gain any information respecting his son John. It was a weight that oppressed him. He inquired if his host had heard speak of some young people, who had made a great noise in the neighbourhood.

“Indeed I have,” said he. “I received them in my house, and they were so satisfied with the reception I gave them that they have carried away one of my daughters.”

Judge of my friend’s distress at this intelligence. In his emotion, he could not avoid exclaiming:

“What! Has my son run away with your daughter?”

“Good Englishman,” said the host, “do not let that grieve you. I am glad to find he is your son. He is handsome, well made, and seems courageous. He did not run away with my dear Parouba, for you must know that Parouba is her name, because it is mine. Had he taken off Parouba it would have been a robbery, and my five sons, who are now hunting some forty or fifty miles from here, would not have endured such an affront. It is a great sin to thieve. My daughter went of her own accord with these young people. She has gone to see the country—a pleasure one cannot deny to one of her age. These travellers will bring her back to me before a month is past. I am sure of it. They promised to do so.”

These words would have made me laugh, had not the evident distress of my friend severely afflicted me.

In the evening, just as we were about to start to take advantage of the wind, one of Parouba’s sons arrived, out of breath, his face expressing horror and despair.

“What is the matter, my son? I thought you were hunting far away. Are you wounded by some savage beast?”

“No, father; not wounded, yet in pain.”

“But whence do you come, son?”

“From a distance of forty miles, without stopping; and I am almost dead.”

The aged father makes him sit down. They give him restoratives. Mr. Freind and I, his little brothers and sisters, with the servants, crowd around him. When he recovered his breath he exclaimed:

“Alas, my sister Parouba is a prisoner of war, and will no doubt be killed.”

The worthy Parouba was grieved at this recital. Mr. Freind, feeling for him as a father, was struck to the very heart. At last the son informed us that a party of silly young Englishmen had attacked, for diversion, the people of the mountains. He said they had with them a very beautiful lady and her maid, and he knew not how his sister came to be with them. The handsome English lady had been scalped and killed, and his sister captured.

“I come here for aid against the people of the Blue Mountains. I will kill them, too, and will retake my dear sister or perish.”

Mr. Freind’s habits of self-command supported him in this trying moment.

“God has given me a son,” said he. “Let him take both father and son, when the eternal decree shall go forth. My friend, I am tempted to think God sometimes acts by a special providence, since he avenges, in America, crimes committed in Europe, and since this wicked Clive-Hart died as she deserved. Perhaps the Sovereign of the universe does in His government punish, even in this world, crimes committed here. I dare not assert; I wish to think so; indeed I should believe it, were not such an opinion opposed to all metaphysical laws.”

After these sad reflections on an event common in America, Freind resumed his usual demeanour.

“I have a good ship,” said he to his host, “with abundant stores. Let us go up the gulf as near as we may to the Blue Mountains. My most anxious business now is to save your daughter. Let us go to your countrymen; say I bear the pipe of peace that I am the grandson of Penn. That name alone will suffice.”

At the name of Penn, so much revered throughout North America, the worthy Parouba and his son felt the greatest respect and the greatest hope. We embarked, and in thirty-six hours reached Baltimore.

We were scarcely in sight of this almost desert place when we saw in the distance a numerous band of mountaineers descending to the plain, armed with axes, tomahawks, and those muskets which Europeans so foolishly sold to them, to procure skins. Already you might hear their frightful howlings. From another side we saw four persons approaching on horseback, accompanied by others on foot. We were taken for people of Baltimore, come there for the purpose of fighting. The horsemen galloped toward us, sword in hand. Our companions prepared to receive them. Mr. Freind, observing them steadily, shuddered for a moment, but soon, resuming his sang-froid:

“Do not stir, my friends,” said he. “Leave all to me.”

He advanced alone and unarmed toward the party. In a moment we saw the chief let fall the bridle from his horse, spring to the ground, and fall prostrate. We uttered a cry of surprise, and advanced. It was John himself, who, bathed in tears, had fallen at the feet of his father. Neither of them was able to speak. Birton, and the two horsemen with him, alighted. But Birton, in his characteristic way, said:

“My dear friend, I did not expect to see you here. You and I seem born for adventures. I am glad to see you.”

Freind, without deigning to reply, looked toward the army of mountaineers, now approaching us. He walked toward them, accompanied by Parouba, who acted as interpreter.

“Fellow countrymen,” said Parouba, “behold a descendant of Penn, who brings you the pipe of peace.”

At these words the eldest of the tribe, raising his hands and eyes to heaven, exclaimed:

“A son of Penn? He is welcome! May the Penns live forever! The great Penn is our manitou, our god. He and his were the only Europeans who did not deceive us, and seize on our land. He bought the territory we gave up to him; he paid for it liberally; he maintained peace among us; he brought us remedies for the few diseases we had caught from the Europeans. He taught us new arts. We never dug up against him and against his children the hatchet of war. For the Penns we always entertain respect.”

Freind immediately sent for thirty hams, as many pies and fowls, with two hundred bottles of Pontac, from the ship. He seated himself close to the chief of the Blue Mountains. John and his companions assisted at the festival. John would rather have been a hundred feet under the earth. His father said nothing to him, and this silence increased his confusion.

Birton, who cared for nothing, seemed very jovial. Freind, before he began to eat, said to Parouba:

“One person, very dear to you, is waiting here. I mean your daughter.”

The chief of the Blue Mountains ordered her to be brought. She had suffered no injury. She smiled to her brother and father, as if she had only returned from a walk.

The chief of the Blue Mountains ordered her to inquire why the warriors of the Blue Mountains had put to death Madame Clive-Hart, and had done nothing to Parouba’s daughter.

“Because we are just,” returned the chief. “That proud English woman belonged to the party that attacked us. She killed one of our men by firing a pistol behind him. We did nothing to Parouba as soon as we ascertained that she was a daughter of our tribes, and only came here for diversion. Every one should be treated according to his desert.”

Freind was affected by this maxim, but he represented to them that the custom of burning captives at the stake was degrading to worthy people, and that, with so much virtue, they should be less ferocious.

The chief then asked us what we did with those whom we killed in battle.

“We bury them.”

“I understand. You leave them for worms to eat. Cannibals think proper to give themselves the preference. Their stomachs are a more honourable grave.”

Birton supported with pleasure the opinions of the mountaineer. He said the custom of boiling and roasting a neighbour must be both ancient and natural, since it prevailed in both hemispheres, and therefore it must be an innate idea; that men were hunted before beasts because it was easier to kill men than wolves; that if the Jews, in their books, so long unknown, imagined that a certain Cain killed a certain Abel, it could only be with a view to eating him; that the same Jews admit they had often fed on human flesh; that the best historians describe the Jews as eating the bleeding flesh of Romans, whom they massacred in Egypt, Cyprus, and Asia, in their revolts against the emperors Trajan and Adrian.

We allowed him to indulge in these coarse jokes, which, though unfortunately true at the bottom, had neither Grecian wit nor Roman urbanity.

Freind, without answering him, addressed the natives. Parouba translated, phrase by phrase. Tillotson himself never spoke with more force. The insinuating Smaldridge never displayed more touching graces. The great secret of eloquence is to convince. He proved to them, accordingly, that the execrable custom of burning captives inspired a ferocity destructive to the human race. For this reason they were strangers to the comforts of society and the tillage of the ground.

At last they all swore, by their great manitou, that they would not burn men and women again.

Thus, from a single conversation, Freind became their legislator, like an Orpheus taming tigers. In vain may the Jesuits describe their miracles in letters which are rarely curious or edifying; they can never equal our good friend.

After loading the chiefs of the Blue Mountains with presents, he conducted the worthy Parouba back to his residence. Young Parouba, with his sister, accompanied us. The others went hunting in the distant forest.

John, Birton, and his companions also embarked in the ship.

Freind persisted in his plan of not reproaching his son, whenever the young scamp did wrong. He left him to self-examination, and to consume his heart, as Pythagoras has it. Nevertheless, he took up the letter thrice, which had been received from England, and looked at his son as he read it. The young man would then cast his eyes on the ground, and respect and repentance might be read on his face.

Birton continued as gay and noisy as if he had just returned from the play. He was in character like the late Duke of Rochester, extreme in debauchery, bravery, sentiments, language, and, in his Epicurean philosophy, attaching himself only to the extraordinary and soon disgusted even then; having the turn of mind that mistakes probabilities for demonstrations; more wise and eloquent than any young man of his age; but too indolent to be profound in anything.

While dining with us on board Mr. Freind said to me:

“Indeed, my dear friend, I hope God will inspire these young people with purer morals, and that Clive-Hart’s terrible example will be a lesson to them.”

Birton, hearing these words, said, in a disdainful tone:

“For a long time I had been dissatisfied with that wicked Clive-Hart. Indeed, I scarcely care more for her than I do for a trussed fowl. But do you believe there exists (I don’t know where) a being perpetually occupied in punishing the wicked men and women who people and depopulate the four quarters of our little world? Do you forget that the terrible Mary, daughter of Henry VIII, was happy till her death? And yet she had caused the execution of eight hundred citizens, of both sexes, on the pretext that they did not believe in transubstantiation and the pope. Her father, nearly as cruel, and her husband, more profoundly wicked, spent their lives in enjoyment. Pope Alexander IV, worse than these, was still more fortunate. All his crimes succeeded. He died at the age of seventy-two, rich and powerful, courted by the kings of the age. Where, then, is this just and avenging God?”

Mr. Freind, with austerity and calmness, replied:

“It seems to me, sir, you ought not to say ‘there is no God.’ Remember, Locke and Newton never pronounced that word but in a tone of reverence that every one remarked.”

“What care I,” returned Birton, “for two men’s grimaces? How did Newton look when he wrote his Commentary on the Apocalypse? Or Locke when he wrote the Dialogue Between a Parrot and the Prince Maurice?”

Then Freind repeated the golden words which should be graven on every heart:

“Let us forget the dreams of great men, and remember the truths they have taught us.”

This reply gave way to a well-sustained conversation, more interesting than that of the bachelor of Salamanca. I sat in a corner and took notes. The company drew round the disputants. The worthy Parouba, his son, and daughter, John’s debauched companions, and John himself, with his head resting on his hands all listened with eager attention.

Chapter VIII.

Dialogue Between Freind And Birton On Atheism.

FREIND. I will not repeat to you, sir, the metaphysical arguments of our celebrated Clarke; I only exhort you to read them again. They are rather intended to convince than affect you. I shall confine myself to arguments calculated to touch your heart.

BIRTON. You will gratify me very much. I like to be amused and interested. I hate sophisms. Metaphysical arguments seem to me like balloons filled with air used between the disputants. The bladders burst, and nothing remains.

FREIND. It is possible there may be some obscurity some bladders in the deep things of Clarke, the respectable Arian. Perhaps he was deceived on the subject of actual infinity. Perhaps when he took upon himself to comment on God, he follows too closely a commentator of Homer, who attributes ideas to his author which he never entertained.

At the words infinity, Homer, commentators, the worthy Parouba and his daughter, and even a few of the English, seemed disposed to go and take an airing on the deck. But Freind promising to be intelligible, they consented to remain. I explained in a whisper to Parouba scientific expressions, which a native of the Blue Mountains was not likely to understand so well as a doctor of Oxford or Cambridge.

FREIND. It would be sad, indeed, if we could not be sure of the existence of God without being metaphysicians. In all England scarcely a hundred minds would be found capable of fathoming the mysteries of the for and against; and the rest of the world would be enveloped in ignorance; a prey to brutal passions; swayed by instinct alone; and only capable of reasoning on the vulgar notions of their carnal interests. To find out God, I only require you to make one effort to open your eyes.

BIRTON. I see your aim. You are returning to the worn-out arguments that the sun turns on its axis in twenty-five days and a half, in spite of the absurd inquisition of Rome; that the light comes to us reflected from Saturn in fifteen minutes, in spite of the absurd supposition of Descartes, that every fixed star is a sun, like ours, surrounded by planets; that the countless stars, scattered through space, obey mathematical laws, discovered and proved by the great Newton; that a catechist announces God to children, and that Newton reveals Him to the sage, as a philosophical Frenchman said, who was persecuted in his own country for asserting as much. Do not trouble yourself to bring before me the ceaseless order which prevails in all parts of the universe. All that exists must have order of some sort. Rarefied matter must take a higher place than denser substances. The strongest press upon the weakest. Bodies moved with a greater impulse progress more rapidly than those moved with less. Things arrange themselves in this way of their own accord. In vain, after drinking a pint of wine, like Esdras, would you talk to me for a hundred and sixty hours together without shutting the mouth, I should not be convinced. Do you wish me to adopt an eternal being, infinite and immutable, who saw fit (I do not know when) to create, from nothing, things which change every moment, and spiders to disembowel flies? Would you have me suppose, with the gossip Nieuwentyt, that God gave us ears that we might have faith, since faith cometh by hearing? No! no! I will not believe these quacks who have sold their drugs at a good price to fools. I keep to the little book of a Frenchman, who maintains that nothing exists nor can exist but nature; that nature does all, and is all; that it is impossible and contradictory that anything can exist beyond ALL. In a word, I believe only in nature.

FREIND. What if I tell you there is no such thing as nature; and that in us, around us, a thousand millions of leagues from us, all is art, without any exception.

BIRTON. What? All art! That’s something new.

FREIND. Few observe that. Nothing, however, is more true. I shall always say, make use of your eyes, and you will recognize and adore God. Think how those vast globes, which you see revolve in their immense orbits, observe deep mathematical laws. There is then a great calculator whom Plato called the eternal geometrician. You admire those newly invented machines, called orreries, because Lord Orrery invented them by imitating the maker. It is a feeble copy of our planetary system and its revolutions; also the periods of the changes of the solstice and equinox which bring us from day to day a new polar planet. This period, this slow course of about twenty-six thousand years, could not be effected in our feeble hands by human orreries. The machine is very imperfect; it must be turned by a handle; yet it is a chef-d’oeuvre of the skill of our artisans. Conceive, then, the power and patience, the genius, of the eternal architect, if we may apply such terms to the Supreme Being.

When I described an orrery to Parouba, he said: “If the copy indicates genius, how much more must there be in the original?”

All present, English and American, felt the force of these words, and raised their hands to heaven. Birton remained thoughtful. Then he cried: “What? all art! Nature the result of art? Can it be possible?”

FREIND. Now, consider yourself; examine with what art, never sufficiently explored, all is constructed within and without for all your wishes and actions. I do not pretend now to lecture on anatomy. You know well enough there is not one superfluous vessel, nor one that does not, in the exercise of its functions, depend on neighbouring vessels. So artificial is the arrangement throughout the body, that there is not a single vein without valves and sluices, making a passage for the blood. From the roots of the hair to the toes, all is art, design, cause, and effect. Indeed, we cannot suppress feelings of indignation toward those who presume to deny final causes, and have the rashness to say that the mouth was not made to eat and speak with that the eyes are not admirably contrived for seeing, the ears for hearing, the nerves for feeling. Such audacity is madness. I cannot conceive it.

Let us admit that every animal renders testimony to the supreme fabricator.

The smallest herb perplexes human intellect. So true is this that the aggregate toil of all men could not create a straw unless the seed be sown in the earth. Let it not be said that the seed must rot in the earth to produce. Such nonsense should not be listened to now.

The company felt the force of these proofs more strongly than the others, because they were more palpable. Birton murmured: “Must I then acknowledge God? We shall see. It is not yet proved.”

John remained thoughtful, and seemed affected.

FREIND. No, my friends. We make nothing, we can do nothing. It is in our power to arrange, unite, calculate, weigh, measure, but, to make! What a word! The essential Being, existing by Himself, alone can make. This is why quacks, who labour at the philosopher’s stone, prove themselves such fools. They boast that they create gold, and they cannot even create clay. Let us then confess, my friends, that there is a necessary and incomprehensible Being who made us.

BIRTON. If He exists, where is He? Why is He concealed? Has any one ever seen Him? Should the creator of good hide Himself?

FREIND. Did you ever see Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul’s, when you were in London? Yet it is clear that church is the work of a great architect.

BIRTON. Every one knows that Wren erected, at a great expense, the vast edifice in which Burgess, when he preaches, sends us to sleep. We know very well why and how our fathers built it. But why and how did God make the universe from nothing? You know well the ancient maxim: “Nothing can create nothing; nothing returns to nothing.” No one ever doubted that truth. Your Bible itself says that your God made heaven and earth, though the heaven, that is, the assemblage of stars, is as superior to the earth, as the earth itself is to one blade of grass. But your Bible does not tell us that God made heaven and earth from nothing. It does not pretend that the Lord made woman from nothing. She was kneaded in a very singular way, from a rib taken from her husband’s side. According to the Bible, chaos existed before the world; therefore matter must be as eternal as your God.

A slight murmur then went round the company; “Birton might be right,” they said.

FREIND. I think I have proved to you that there is a supreme intelligence; an eternal power to whom we owe our passing existence. I have not engaged to tell you the how and the why. God has given me sufficient reason to know that He exists, but not enough to discover whether matter has been subject to Him from eternity, or whether He created it in time. What have you to do with the creation of matter, provided you acknowledge a God the ruler of matter and of yourself? You ask me where God is? I do not know. I ought not to know. I know that He is; I know that He is my maker; that He makes all, and that we ought to depend on His goodness.

BIRTON. His goodness! Are you jesting with me? Did you not tell me to make use of my eyes? Make use of yours. Glance at the world, and then talk of the goodness of God.

Mr. Freind saw that he had now reached the most difficult part of the dispute, and that Birton was preparing a rude assault. He saw that the hearers, especially the Americans, together with himself, required a little respite. Recommending himself therefore to God, they went on deck for exercise. When tea was served, the disputation was renewed.

Chapter IX.

On Atheism.

BIRTON. You must not expect such success, sir, on the subject of goodness as you have had on ingenuity and power. First, I shall touch on the misconstructions of our globe, in many instances opposed to the cleverness so much boasted of; then I intend to dwell on the perpetual crimes and misfortunes of the inhabitants; and you will judge of the great ruler’s paternal affection for them.

I shall begin by telling you that in Gloucestershire, my county, when we breed horses, we rear them with care, in fine pasturage and good stables, with hay and oats. Pray, what shelter and food had these poor Americans, when we discovered their continent? They were obliged to scour over thirty or forty miles for food. All the northern coast of the old world is exposed to the same cruel necessity; and from Swedish Laponia to the Sea of Japan, a hundred tribes spend a life as short as it is wretched, in the most complete want, amidst eternal snows.

Fine climates are continually exposed to destructive scourges. There we walk over burning precipices, covered by fertile plains, which prove but deadly snares. There is no hell but this, doubtless; and it opens a hundred times beneath our feet.

They tell us of a universal deluge, an even physically impossible, and at which all sensible people laugh. But they console us by saying it only lasted ten months. I wonder it did not put out the fires which have since destroyed so many flourishing towns. Your St. Augustine tells us of a hundred cities burnt or swallowed up in Libya by an earthquake. Volcanoes have several times devastated lovely Italy. As a crowning misfortune, the inhabitants of the Arctic Circle are not exempt from these subterranean fires. The Icelander, always in alarm, has hunger staring him in the face, and a hundred feet of flame or ice to the right or left, under his Mount Hecla; for the great volcanoes are always found among terrible mountains.

It is in vain to say that mountains of two thousand toises in elevation are nothing on a globe nine thousand miles in diameter, or like the irregularities of an orange compared with the bulk of that fruit that it is scarcely one foot to every three thousand feet. Alas! what then are we, if high mountains are but as figures one foot high for every three thousand feet, or four inches for every nine thousand inches? We are then animals absolutely imperceptible; yet we are liable to be crushed by all that surrounds us, though our infinite littleness, so closely bordering on nothing, might seem to secure us from all accidents. Besides the countless cities, destroyed and re-destroyed like as many ant-hills, what shall we say to the seas of sand that cross the centre of Africa, and whose burning waves raised by the wind have buried entire armies? What is the use of the vast deserts on the borders of Syria deserts so horrible that the ferocious animals, called Jews, imagined they had reached Paradise when they passed from these scenes of horror into a little corner of land where they could cultivate a few acres? It is not enough that man (the noble creature) should be so ill lodged, clothed, and fed, for so many ages. He comes into the world to live for a few days, perplexed by deceitful hopes and real vexations. His body, contrived with useless art, is a prey to all the ills resulting from that very art. He lives between the dangers of poison and plague. No one can remember the list of ills we are subject to; and the modest doctors of. Switzerland pretend they can cure them all.

While Birton said this, the company listened with attention and even emotion. Parouba said: “Let us see how the doctor will get over this.”

Even John said in a low tone: “On my word, he is right. I was a fool to be so soon touched by my father’s conversation.”

Mr. Freind waited till their imaginations were a little recovered from the assault, and then resumed the discussion.

FREIND. A young theologian would answer these sad truths by sophisms, backed with quotations from St. Basil and St. Cyril. For my part, I shall admit that there are many physical evils in the world. I will not even lessen the number, though Mr. Birton has seen fit to exaggerate. I ask you, my dear Parouba, is not your climate made for you? It cannot be injurious, since neither you nor your companions wish to leave it. Esquimaux, Icelanders, Laplanders, Asiatics, and Indians, never think of leaving theirs. The reindeer, which God has sent to clothe and feed them, die when transported to another zone. Laplanders themselves die in southern climates. The south of Siberia is too warm for them; here they would die of heat. It is evident that God made every kind of animal and vegetable for the clime in which it thrives. Negroes, a race of men so different from ours, are so thoroughly formed for their country, that thousands of them have preferred death to slavery elsewhere. The camel and ostrich are quite at home in the sands of Africa. The bull abounds in fertile countries, where the grass is ever fresh for his nourishment. Cinnamon and spice only grow in India. Barley is only useful in those countries where God has appointed it to grow. From one end of America to the other, you have different kinds of food. The vine cannot be brought to perfection in England, nor in Sweden and Canada. This is the reason that in some countries the elements of religious rites consist in bread and wine; and they do well to thank God for the food and beverage His goodness has provided; and Americans would do well to thank Him for their Indian corn and arrow-root. Throughout the world God has suited all animals, from the snail to man, to the countries in which He has placed them. Let us not reproach Providence when we owe Him praises.

But to consider scourges, such as inundations, volcanoes, earthquakes. If you confine your attention to the accidents which sometimes happen to the wheels of the eternal machine, you may well consider God as a tyrant; but observe his ceaseless benefits, and He becomes a compassionate father.

You have quoted Augustine and his account of the destruction of a hundred cities; but remember the African rhetorician often contradicts himself and was prodigal of exaggerations in his writings. He wrote of earthquakes as he did of the efficacy of grace, and the damnation of children dying without baptism. Has he not said in his thirty-seventh sermon, that he had seen people in Ethiopia with one eye in the middle of the forehead like the Cyclops, and a whole race without heads?

We, who are not fathers of the church, ought not to go beyond nor to stop short of truth; and the truth is, that of the houses destroyed, we cannot reckon that more than one out of every hundred thousand is destroyed by the fires necessary to the due performance of the operations of the world.

So essential to the nature of the universe is fire, that but for it there would be no sun nor stars, no animals, vegetables, or minerals. The fire, placed under the earth, is subject to fixed natural laws. Some disasters may nevertheless occur. You cannot say a man is a poor artisan when an immense machine, formed by him, lasts unimpaired for years. If a man invented a hydraulic engine to water a province, would you disparage his work because it destroys some insects?

I have shown you that the machine of the world is the work of an intelligent and powerful Being; you, who are intelligent, ought to admire Him; you, who are laden with His gifts, ought to adore Him.

But how, you inquire, can the wretches who are condemned to languish under incurable evils how can they admire and love? I must tell you, that such ills are generally brought on ourselves, or come to us from our fathers, who abused their bodies, and not from the great fabricator. No disease but decrepitude was known in America till we introduced strong liquors, the source of all evils.

Let us remember that in Milton’s poem, the simple Adam is made to inquire if he will live long. Yes, is the reply, if you take nothing to excess. Observe this rule, my friends. Can you require that God should let you live for ages, as the reward of your gluttony, your drunkenness, your incontinence, and your indulgence in infamous passions, which corrupt the blood and necessarily shorten life?

I approved of this reply. Parouba liked it; but Birton was not moved. I read in John’s eyes that he was still doubtful. Birton rejoined in these terms:

BIRTON. Since you have made use of common arguments, with a few novel remarks, I may be allowed to follow your plan. If so good and powerful a God existed, surely He would not have suffered evil to enter the world, nor have devoted His creatures to grief and crime. If He cannot prevent evil, He is not almighty; if He will not, He is cruel.

The annals of the Brahmins only extend back 8,000 years; those of the Chinese only 5,000. Our knowledge is but of yesterday; but in that brief space all is horror. Murder has been the practice from one end of the earth to the other; and men have been weak enough to give to those men who slew the greatest number of their fellow creatures, the titles of heroes, demi-gods, and even gods.

In America there were left two great nations, beginning to enjoy the sweets of peace and civilization, when the Spaniards came there to slay eleven millions. They hunted men down with dogs; and King Ferdinand of Castile gave those dogs pensions for their services.

The heroes who subdued the New World massacred innocent and helpless babes, murdered peaceable and defenceless Indians, and committed the most inhuman barbarities! They roasted King Guatemozin, in Mexico, on a gridiron. They hastened to Peru to convert the Inca, Atahualpa. A priest, named Almagro, son of a priest condemned to be hanged in Spain for highway robbery, went there with one Pizarro, to inform the Emperor of the Peruvians, by the voice of another priest, that a third priest, named Alexander IV., polluted by incest, assassination, and homicide, had given, with his full consent (proprio motu) and with full power, not only Peru, but one-half of the New World, to the King of Spain; and that Atahualpa ought instantly to submit, under pain of suffering the indignation of the apostles Peter and Paul. But as this king knew as little of Latin as the priest who read the papal bull, he was instantly declared heretical and incredulous.

They burned Atahualpa, as they had burned Guatemozin. They slew his people; and all to gain that hard and yellow earth which has only served to depopulate and impoverish Spain; for it has made her neglect the cultivation of the earth, which really nourishes man.

Now, my dear Mr. Freind, if the fantastic and ridiculous being men call the devil had wished to make men in his image, would he have made them otherwise? Do not, then, attribute such an abominable work to God.

This speech brought the party round again to Birton’s views. I saw John rejoice in himself; even young Parouba heard with horror of the priest Almagro of the priest who read the Latin bull of the priest Alexander IV, of all Christians who committed, under pretence of devotion, such crimes to obtain gold. I confess, I trembled for Freind. I despaired of his cause. He replied, however, without embarrassment.

FREIND. Remember, my friends, there is a God. This I proved to you; you agreed to it, and after being driven to admit that he exists, you strive to find out his imperfections, vices, and wickedness.

I am far from asserting, with some reasoners, that private ills form the general good. This is too ridiculous a sentiment. I admit, with grief, that the world contains much moral and physical evil; but, since it is certain that God exists, it is also certain that all these evils cannot prevent God’s existence. He cannot be cruel. What interest could make Him so? There are horrible evils in the world, my friends. Let us not swell their number. It is impossible that God can be other than good; but men are perverse, and make a detestable use of the liberty that God has given and ought to have given that is, the power of exercising their wills, without which they would be simple machines, formed by a wicked being, to be broken at his caprice.

All enlightened Spaniards agree that a small number of their ancestors abused this liberty so far as to commit crimes that make human nature shudder. The second Don Carlos did what he could to repair the atrocities committed by the Spaniards under Ferdinand and Charles V.

If there is crime in the world, my friends, there is virtue as well.

BIRTON. Ah! ha! virtue! A good joke! I should like to see this virtue. Where is she to be found?

At these words I could not contain myself.

“You may find her,” said I, “in the worthy Mr. Freind, in Parouba, even in yourself when your heart is cleansed of its vices.”

He blushed; and John also. The latter looked down and seemed to feel remorse. His father surveyed him with compassion and resumed.

FREIND. Yes, dear friends. If there have always been crimes, there have always been virtues, too. Athens had such men as Socrates, as well as such as Anitus. Rome had Catos as well as Sullas. Nero frightened the world by his atrocities, but Titus, Trajan, and the Antonines consoled it by their benevolence. My friend will explain to Parouba who these great men were. Fortunately, I have Epictetus in my pocket. Epictetus was a slave, but the equal of Marcus Aurelius in mind. Listen, and may all who pretend to teach men hear what Epictetus says to himself: “God made me; I feel this; and shall I dare to dishonour Him by infamous thoughts, criminal actions, and base desires?” His mind agreed with his conversation. Marcus Aurelius, on the throne of Europe and two parts of our hemisphere, did not think otherwise than the slave Epictetus. The one was never humiliated by meanness, nor the other dazzled by greatness; and when they wrote their thoughts it was for the use of their disciples, and not to be extolled in the papers. Pray, in your opinion, were not Locke, Newton, Tillotson, Penn, Clarke, the good man called “The Man of Ross,” and many others, in and beyond your island, models of virtue?

You have alluded to the cruel and unjust wars of which so many nations have been guilty. You have described the abominations of Christians in Mexico and Peru; you might add the St. Bartholomew of France and the Irish massacre. But are there not people who have always held in abhorrence the shedding of blood? Have not the Brahmins in all ages given this example to the world? and, even in this country, have we not near us, in Pennsylvania, our Philadelphians, whom they attempt in vain to ridicule by the name of Quakers, and who have always hated war?

Have we not the Carolinas, where the great Locke dictated laws? In these two lands of virtue, all citizens are equal; all consciences are free; all religions good; provided they worship God. There all men are brethren. You have seen, Mr. Birton, the inhabitants of the Blue Mountains lay down their arms before a descendant of Penn. They felt the force of virtue. You persist in disavowing it. Because the earth produces poisons as well as wholesome plants, will you prefer the poisons?

BIRTON. Oh, sir, your poisons are not to the point. If God made them, they are his work. He is master, and does all. His hand directs Cromwell’s when he signs the death warrant of Charles I. His arm conducts the headsman’s who severs his head from the body. No, I cannot admit that God is a homicide.

FREIND. Nor I. Pray, hear me. You will admit that God governs by general laws. According to these laws, Cromwell, a monster of fanaticism and envy, determines to sacrifice Charles I. to his own interest, which, no doubt, all men seek to promote, though they do not understand it alike. According to the laws of motion established by God, the executioner cuts off his head. But assuredly it is not God who commits the assassination by a particular act of his will. God was not Cromwell, nor Ravaillac, nor Balthasar Gerard, nor the preaching friar, James Clement. God does not permit, nor command, nor authorize crime. But he has made man; he has established laws of motion; and these eternal laws are equally executed by the good man who stretches out his hand to the poor, and by the hand of a villain who assassinates his brother. In the same way that God did not extinguish the sun. or swallow up Spain, to punish Cortes, Almagro, and Pizarro, so, also, he does not send a company of angels to London, nor make a hundred thousand pipes of Burgundy to descend from heaven to delight the hearts of his dear Englishmen, when they do good. His general providence would become ridiculous, if thus made manifest to every individual; and this is so striking, that God never punishes a criminal immediately, by a decided stroke of his power. He lets the sun shine on the evil and the good. If some wretches expire in their crimes, it is by the general laws that govern the world. I have read in a great book, by a Frenchman called Mézeray, that God caused our Henry V to suffer a painful death, because he dared to sit on the throne of a Christian king.

The physical part of a bad action is the effect of the primary laws given to matter by the hand of God. All moral evil is the effect of the liberty which man abuses.

In a word, without plunging into the fogs of metaphysics, let us remember that the existence of God is proved. We have no longer to argue on that point. Take God from the world, and does the assassination of Charles I. become more lawful? Do you feel less aversion towards his executioner? God exists. Enough. If he exists, he is just. Be, then, just also.

BIRTON. Your argument has strength and force, though it does not altogether exonerate God from being the author of physical and moral evil. I see your way of justifying him makes an impression on the assembly; but might it not be contrived that these laws should not involve such particular misfortunes? You have proved to me a powerful and eternal God, and I was almost on the point of believing. But I have some terrible objections to make. Come, John, courage; let us not be cast down.

Chapter X.

On Atheism.

Night closed in beautifully. The atmosphere presented a vault of transparent azure, spangled with golden stars. Such a spectacle always affects man, and inspires him with pleasant reveries. The worthy Parouba admired the heavens, like a German when he beholds St. Peter’s at Rome, or the Opera at Naples, for the first time.

“What a boldly arched vault,” said he to Freind.

“It is no arch at all,” replied Freind. “The blue dome you behold is nothing more than a collection of vapours, which God has so disposed and combined with the mechanism of your eyes that, wherever you may be, you are still in the centre of your promenade, and perceive what is called heaven, arched above your head.”

“And those stars, Mr. Freind?”

“As I have already said, they are so many suns, round which other worlds revolve. Far from being attached to that blue vault, remember that they are at various and prodigious distances from us. That star is twelve hundred millions of miles from our sun.”

Then, showing him the telescope he had brought, he pointed out to him the planets Jupiter, with his four moons; Saturn, with his five moons and mysterious ring.

“It is the same light,” said he, “which proceeds from all these luminaries, and comes to us from this planet, in a quarter of an hour, and from that star, in six months.”

Parouba was deeply impressed, and said: “The heavens proclaim a God.” All the crew looked on with admiration. But the pertinacious Birton, unmoved, continued as follows:

BIRTON. Be it so! There is a God; I grant it. But what is that to you and me? What connection is there between the superior Being and worms of the earth? What relation is there between His essence and ours? Epicurus, when he supposed a God in the planets, did well to conclude that he took no part in our horrors and follies; that we could neither please nor offend him; that he had no need of us; nor we of him. You admit a God, more worthy of the human mind than the God of Epicurus, or the gods of the east and west; but if you assert, with so many others, that God made the world and man for His own glory; that He formerly required sacrifices of oxen for His glory; that He appeared for His glory in our biped form, you would, I think, be asserting an absurdity. The love of glory is nothing but pride. A proud man is a conceited fellow, such as Shakespeare would introduce in his plays. This epithet cannot suit God it does not agree with the divine nature any more than injustice, cruelty or inconstancy. If God condescended to regulate the universe, it could only be to make others happy. Has He done so?

FREIND. He has doubtless succeeded with all just spirits. They will be happy one day; if they are not so now.

BIRTON. Happy! How? When? Who told you so?

FREIND. His justice.

BIRTON. Will you tell me that we shall live eternally that we have immortal souls after admitting that the Jews, whom you boast of having succeeded, did not entertain this notion of immortality up to the time of Herod? This idea of an immortal soul was invented by the Brahmins, adopted by the Persians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, and was for a long time unknown to the insignificant and superstitious Jewish tribes. Alas! sir, how do we know that we have souls? or how do we know but other animals, who have similar passions, wills, appetites, and memories, so incomprehensible to us, have not souls as well?

Hitherto I have thought that there is in nature a power by which we have the faculty of life in all our body, walking with our feet, taking with our hands, seeing with our eyes, feeling with our nerves, thinking with our brain, and that all this is called the soul, which is merely a vague word, signifying the unknown principle of our faculties. With you, I will call God the intelligent principle animating nature; but has He condescended to reveal Himself to us?

FREIND. Yes, by His works.

BIRTON. Has He revealed His laws, or spoken to us?

FREIND. Yes, by the voice of conscience. Is it true, that, if you killed your father and mother, your conscience would be a prey to a remorse as terrible as it would be involuntary? Is not this truth avowed and felt throughout the world? To come down to lesser crimes do they not all revolt us at the first glance make us turn pale when we commit them for the first time and leave in our hearts the stings of repentance?

BIRTON. I must confess it.

FREIND. God, in thus speaking to your heart, has commanded you to abstain from crime. As for equivocal actions, which some condemn and others approve, what can we do better than follow the grand rule of Zoroaster “When you are not sure whether the action you are about to commit is good or bad, abstain from it.”

BIRTON. An admirable maxim, and doubtless the most beautiful ever advanced in morals. I admit that, from time to time, God has raised up men to teach virtue to their degraded fellows. I apologize to you for speaking lightly of virtue.

FREIND. Rather apologize to the Supreme Being, who can reward and punish eternally.

BIRTON. What! will God punish me for yielding to passions He has given me?

FREIND. He has given you passions with which you can do both good and evil. I do not tell you He will punish eternally; nor how He will punish; for no one can know that. The Brahmins were the first to conceive a place of imprisonment for those who had revolted from God; they were shut up in a description of hell, called Onderah, but were gradually liberated at various periods. Hence we have our mixture of virtues, vices, pleasures, and calamities. This conceit is ingenious, and that of Pandora and Prometheus more so. Less polished nations have vulgarly imitated the same fable. These inventions are the fancies of Eastern philosophy. All I can say is, that if by abusing your liberty you have done evil, you cannot say God will not punish you.

BIRTON. I have tried to convince myself that He could not; but in vain. I confess I have abused my liberty, and that God may well punish me. But I cannot be punished when I have ceased to exist.

FREIND. The best course is to be virtuous as long as you exist.

BIRTON. To be virtuous! Well, I confess I think you are right. It is the best course.

I wish, my dear friend, you had witnessed the effect of Freind’s discourse on both the English and Americans. The light, saucy Birton became thoughtful and modest. John fell at his father’s feet, with tears in his eyes, and his father embraced him. I shall now proceed to relate the last scene of this interesting disputation.

BIRTON. I conceive that the great master of the universe is eternal; but we, who are but of yesterday, may we presume to expect immortality? All beings around us perish, from the insect devoured by the swallow, to the elephant, eaten by worms.

FREIND. Nothing perishes; but all things change. The germs of animals and vegetables subsist, develop, and multiply. Why can you not allow that God might preserve the principle which makes us act and think, of whatever nature it may be? God preserve me from making a system; but certainly there is in us something that wills and thinks. This something, formerly called a monad, is imperceptible. God has given it us, or, rather, God has given us to it. Are you sure he cannot preserve it in being? Can you give me any proof?

BIRTON. No! I have sought for a proof in all the atheistical books within my reach, and especially in the third book of Lucretius, but I never found anything but conjectures.

FREIND. And shall we on simple conjecture give ourselves up to fatal passions, and live like brutes, with no other restraint upon us than the fear of men, rendered eternally cruel to each other by their mutual dread? For we always wish to destroy what we fear. Think, sir! think seriously, my son John. To expect neither reward nor punishment is the true spirit of atheism. What is the use of a God who has no power over you? As though one should say, “There is a very powerful king in China,” I reply, “Success to him; let him keep in his territory, I in mine. I care no more for him than he cares for me. He has no more control over me than a canon of Windsor over a member of parliament.” Then should I be a God to myself, sacrificing the whole world to my caprice? And recognizing no law, I should only consider myself? If others are sheep, I should become the wolf. If they choose to play the chicken, I should play the fox.

I will presume (God forbid it) that all Englishmen are atheists. I will allow that there may be some peaceable citizens, quiet by nature, rich enough to be honest, regulated by honour, and so attentive to demeanour, that they contrive to live together in society. They cultivate the arts which improve morals; they live at peace in the innocent gayety of honest people. But the poor and needy atheist, sure of impunity, would be a fool if he did not assassinate or steal to get money. Then would all the bonds of society be sundered. All secret crimes would inundate the world, and, like locusts, though at first imperceptible, would overspread the earth. The common people would become hordes of thieves, like those of our day, of whom not a tenth part are hanged at our sessions. They would pass their wretched lives in taverns, with bad women. They would fight together, and fall down drunk amidst the pewter pots with which they break each other’s heads. Nor would they rise but to steal and murder again, to recommence the same round of hideous brutality. Who, then, would restrain great kings in their fury? An atheist king is more dangerous than a fanatical Ravaillac.

Atheism abounded in Italy during the fifteenth century. What was the consequence? It was as common a matter to poison another as to invite him to supper. The stroke of the stiletto was as frequent as an embrace. There were then professors of crime, as we now have professors of music and mathematics. Churches, even, were the favourite scenes of murder, and princes were slain at the altar. In this way Pope Sixtus IV and the archbishop of Pisa put to death two of the most accomplished princes of Europe. Explain, my dear friend, to Parouba and his children, what I mean by a pope and an archbishop; but tell them we have no such monsters now. But to resume: A duke of Milan was also slain in a church. Every one knows the astonishing horrors of Alexander VI. Had such morals continued, Italy would have been more desolate than Peru after the invasion.

Faith, then, in a God who rewards good actions, punishes the bad, and forgives lesser faults, is most useful to mankind. It is the only restraint on powerful men, who insolently commit crimes on the public, and on others who skilfully perpetrate offences. I do not tell you to mingle, with this necessary faith, superstitious notions that disgrace it. Atheism is a monster that would prey on mankind only to satisfy its voracity. Superstition is another phantom, preying upon men as a deity. I have often observed that an atheist may be cured, but we rarely cure superstition radically. The atheist is generally an inquiring man, who is deceived; the superstitious man is a brutal fool, having no ideas of his own. An atheist might assault Iphigenia when on the point of marrying Achilles, but a fanatic would piously sacrifice her on the altar, and think he did service to Jupiter. An atheist would steal a golden vessel from the altar to feast his favourites, but the fanatic would celebrate an auto da fé in the same church, and sing hymns while he was causing Jews to be burned alive. Yes, my friends, superstition and atheism are the two poles of a universe in confusion. Tread these paths with a firm step, believe in a good God, and be good. This is all that the great philosophers, Penn and Locke, require of their people.

Answer me, Mr. Birton, and you, my friends, what harm can the worship of God, joined to the happiness of a virtuous life, do you? We might be seized with mortal sickness, even now while I am speaking. Who, then, would not wish to have lived innocently? Read, in Shakespeare, the death of our wicked Richard III, and see how the hosts of those he had murdered haunted his imagination. Witness the death of Charles IX after the horrors of St. Bartholomew. In vain his chaplain assured him he had done well. His blood started from every pore. All the blood he had shed cried out against him. Believe me, all these monsters were tortured by remorse, and died in despair.

Birton and his friends could contain themselves no longer. They fell at Freind’s feet. “Yes,” said Birton, “I believe in God, and I believe you.”

Chapter XI.

Return To England. John’s Marriage.

We were already near Parouba’s house, and we supped there. John could eat nothing. He sat apart in tears. His father went to console him.

“Ah,” said John, “I do not deserve such a father. I shall die of shame for yielding to the fascination of that wicked Clive-Hart. I am the cause of Miss Primrose’s death. Just now, when you talked of poison, I shuddered, for I thought I saw Clive-Hart presenting the horrible draught to Primrose. How could I have so far lost myself as to accompany so vile a creature? I was blind. I did not discover my error till she was taken by the savages. In a fit of rage she almost admitted her guilt. From that moment I have loathed her, and, for a punishment, the form of Primrose is ever before me, and seems to say, ‘I died because I loved you!’” His father said a blameless life could alone repair his past errors.

The next day we sailed for England, after giving presents to the Paroubas. Tears mingled with our adieus, and Birton, who had been only giddy, already seemed a reasonable person.

When we were out at sea Freind said to John, in my presence: “Do you still cherish the memory of the amiable Primrose?” These words so wrung the heart of the young man that I feared he would throw himself into the sea.

“Console yourself, then,” said Freind. “Miss Primrose is alive, and loves you still.”

Freind had received certain information on this subject from his servant, who had written to him punctually by every ship. Mr. Mead, who has since acquired so great a reputation by his skill in the counteraction of poisons, had saved the young lady’s life. In a moment John passed from despair to extreme joy. I will not attempt to describe the change. It was the happiest moment of his life. Birton and his friends shared his joy. What more shall I say? The worthy Freind was as a father to all. The wedding was celebrated at Dr. Mead’s. Birton, now another man, also married, and he and John are now among the best people in England.

Admit that a wise man can instruct fools.

THE WHITE BULL.

Le Taureau blanc

(1772)

Chapter I.

How The Princess Amasidia Meets A Bull.

The princess Amasidia, daughter of Amasis, king of Tanis in Egypt, took a walk upon the highway of Peluaium with the ladies of her train. She was sunk in deep melancholy. Tears gushed from her beautiful eyes. The cause of her grief was known, as well as the fears she entertained lest that grief should displease the king, her father. The old man, Mambres, ancient magician and eunuch of the Pharaohs, was beside her, and seldom left her. He was present at her birth. He had educated her, and taught her all that a fair princess was allowed to know of the sciences of Egypt. The mind of Amasidia equalled her beauty. Her sensibility and tenderness rivalled the charms of her person, and it was this sensibility which cost her so many tears.

The princess was twenty-four years old; the magician, Mambres, about thirteen hundred. It was he, as every one knows, who had that famous dispute with Moses, in which the victory was so long doubtful between these two profound philosophers. If Mambres yielded, it was owing to the visible protection of the celestial powers, who favoured his rival. It required gods to overcome Mambres.

Amasis made him superintendent of his daughter’s household, and he acquitted himself in this office with his usual prudence. His compassion was excited by the sighs of the beautiful Amasidia.

“O my lover!” said she to herself, “my young, my dear lover! O greatest of conquerors, most accomplished, most beautiful of men! Almost seven years hast thou disappeared from the world. What god hath snatched thee from thy tender Amasidia? Thou art not dead. The wise Egyptian prophets confess this. But thou art dead to me. I am alone in the world. To me it is a desert. By what extraordinary prodigy hast thou abandoned thy throne and thy mistress? thy throne, which was the first in the world. However, that is a matter of small consequence; but to abandon me, who adores thee! O my dear Ne—”

She was going on.

“Tremble to pronounce that fatal name,” said Mambres, the ancient eunuch and magician of the Pharaohs. “You would perhaps be discovered by some of the ladies of your court. They are all very much devoted to you, and all fair ladies certainly make it a merit to serve the noble passions of fair princesses. But there may be one among them indiscreet, and even treacherous. You know that your father, although he loves you, has sworn to put you to death should you pronounce the terrible name always ready to escape your lips. This law is severe, but you have not been educated in Egyptian wisdom to be ignorant of the government of the tongue. Remember that Hippocrates, one of our greatest gods, has always his finger upon his mouth.”

The beautiful Amasidia wept, and was silent.

As she pensively advanced towards the banks of the Nile she perceived at a distance, under a thicket watered by the river, an old woman, in a tattered gray garment, seated on a hillock. This old woman had beside her a she-ass, a dog, and a he-goat. Opposite to her was a serpent, which was not like the common serpents, for its eyes were mild, its physiognomy noble and engaging, while its skin shone with the liveliest and brightest colours. A huge fish, half immersed in the river, was not the least astonishing figure in the group, and on a neighbouring tree were perched a raven and a pigeon. All these creatures seemed to carry on a very animated conversation.

“Alas!” said the princess, in a low tone, “these animals undoubtedly speak of their loves, and it is not so much as allowed me to mention the name of mine.”

The old woman held in her hand a slender steel chain a hundred fathoms long, to which was fastened a bull, who fed in the meadow. This bull was white, perfectly well made, plump, and at the same time agile, which is a thing seldom to be found. He was indeed the most beautiful specimen that was ever seen of his kind. Neither the bull of Pasiphae, nor that in whose shape Jupiter appeared when he carried off Europa, could be compared to this noble animal. The charming young heifer into which Isis was changed would have scarce been worthy of his company.

As soon as the bull saw the princess he ran toward her with the swiftness of a young Arabian horse, that pricks up his ears and flies over the plains and rivers of the ancient Saana to approach the lovely consort whose image reigns in his heart. The old woman used her utmost efforts to restrain the bull. The serpent wanted to terrify him by its hissing. The dog followed him and bit his beautiful limbs. The she-ass crossed his way and kicked him to make him return. The great fish remounted the Nile, and, darting himself out of the water, threatened to devour him. The he-goat remained immovable, apparently struck with fear. The raven fluttered round his head as if it wanted to tear out his eyes. The pigeon alone accompanied him from curiosity, and applauded him by a sweet murmur.

So extraordinary a sight threw Mambres into serious reflections. In the meanwhile the white bull, dragging after him his chain and the old woman, had already reached the princess, who was struck with astonishment and fear. He threw himself at her feet. He kissed them. He shed tears. He looked upon her with eyes in which there was a strange mixture of grief and joy. He dared not to low, lest he should terrify the beautiful Amasidia. He could not speak. A weak use of the voice, granted by heaven to certain animals, was denied him; but all his actions were eloquent. The princess was delighted with him. She perceived that a trifling amusement could suspend for some moments even the most poignant grief.

“Here,” said she, “is a most amiable animal. I could wish much to have him in my stable.”

At these words the bull bent himself on his knees and kissed the ground.

“He understands me,” cried the princess. “He shows me that he wants to be mine. Ah, heavenly magician! ah, divine eunuch! Give me this consolation. Purchase this beautiful bovine. Settle the price with the old woman, to whom he no doubt belongs. This animal must be mine. Do not refuse me this innocent comfort.”

All the ladies joined their requests to the entreaties of the princess. Mambres yielded to them, and immediately went to speak to the old woman.

Chapter II.

How The Wise Mambres, Formerly Magician Of Pharaoh, Knew Again The Old Woman, And Was Known By Her.

“Madam,” said Mambres to her, “you know that ladies, and particularly princesses, have need of amusement. The daughter of the king is distractedly fond of your bull. I beg that you will sell him to us. You shall be paid in ready money.”

“Sir,” answered the old woman, “this precious animal does not belong to me. I am charged, together with all the beasts which you see, to keep him with care, to watch all his motions, and to give an exact account of them. God forbid that I should ever have any inclination to sell this invaluable animal.”

Mambres, upon this discourse, began to have a confused remembrance of something which he could not yet properly distinguish. He eyed the old woman in the gray cloak with greater attention.

“Respectable lady,” said he to her, “I either mistake, or I have seen you formerly.”

“I make no mistake, sir,” replied the old woman. I have seen you seven hundred years ago, in a journey which I made from Syria into Egypt some months after the destruction of Troy, when Hiram the Second reigned at Tyre, and Nephel Keres in ancient Egypt.”

“Ah! Madam,” cried the old man, “you are the remarkable witch of Endor.”

“And you, sir,” said the sorceress, embracing him, “are the great Mambres of Egypt.”

“O unforeseen meeting! memorable day! eternal decrees!” said Mambres. “It certainly is not without permission of the universal providence that we meet again in this meadow, upon the banks of the Nile, near the noble city of Tanis. What, is it indeed you,” continued Mambres, “who are so famous upon the banks of your little Jordan, and the first person in the world for raising apparitions?”

“What, is it you, sir?” replied Miss Endor, “who are so famous for changing rods into serpents, the day into darkness, and rivers into blood?”

“Yes, madam, but my great age has in part deprived me of my knowledge and power. I am ignorant from whence you have this beautiful bull, and who these animals are that, together with you, watch round him.”

The old woman, recollecting herself, raised her eyes to heaven, and then replied:

“My dear Mambres, we are of the same profession, but it is expressly forbidden me to tell you who this bull is. I can satisfy you with regard to the other animals. You will easily know them by the marks which characterize them. The serpent is that which persuaded Eve to eat an apple, and to make her husband partake of it. The ass, that which spoke to your contemporary, Balaam, in a remarkable discourse. The fish, which always carries its head above water, is that which swallowed Jonah a few years ago. The dog is he who followed Raphael and the young Tobit in their journey to Ragusa in Media, in the time of the great Salamanzar. This goat is he who expiates all the sins of your nation. The raven and the pigeon, those which were in the ark of Noah. Great event! universal catastrophe! of which almost all the world is still ignorant. You are now informed. But of the bull you can know nothing.”

Mambres, having listened with respect, said:

“The Eternal, O illustrious witch! reveals and conceals what he thinks proper. All these animals who, together with you, are intrusted with the custody of the white bull, are only known to your generous and agreeable nation, which is itself unknown to almost all the world. The miracles which you and yours, I and mine, have performed, shall one day be a great subject of doubt and scandal to inquisitive philosophers. But happily these miracles shall find belief with the devout sages, who shall prove submissive to the enlightened in one corner of the world; and this is all that is necessary.”

As he spoke these words the princess pulled him by the sleeve, and said to him:

“Mambres, will you not buy. my bull?”

The magician, plunged into a deep reverie, made no reply, and Amasidia poured forth her tears.

She then addressed herself to the old woman.

“My good woman,” said she, “I conjure you, by all you hold most dear in the world, by your father, by your mother, by your nurse, who are certainly still alive, to sell me not only your bull, but likewise your pigeon, which seems very much attached to him.”

“As for the other animals, I do not want them; but I shall catch the vapours if you do not sell me this charming bull, who will be all the happiness of my life.”

The old woman respectfully kissed the fringe of her gauze robe, and replied:

“Princess, my bull is not to be sold. Your illustrious magician is acquainted with this. All that I can do for your service is to permit him to feed every day near your palace. You may caress him, give him biscuits, and make him dance about at your pleasure; but he must always be under the eyes of all these animals who accompany me, and who are charged with the keeping of him. If he does not endeavour to escape from them, they will prove peaceable; but if he attempt once more to break his chain, as he did upon seeing you, woe be unto him. I would not then answer for his life. This large fish, which you see, will certainly swallow him, and keep him longer than three days in his belly; or this serpent, who appears to you so mild, will give him a mortal sting.”

The white bull, who understood perfectly the old woman’s conversation, but was unable to speak, humbly accepted all the proposals. He laid himself down at her feet; he lowed softly; and, looking tenderly at Amasidia, seemed to say to her:

“Come and see me sometimes, upon the lawn.”

The serpent now took up the conversation:

“Princess,” said he, “I advise you to act implicitly as mademoiselle of Endor has told you.”

The she-ass likewise put in her word, and was of the opinion of the serpent.

Amasidia was afflicted that this serpent and this ass should speak so well; while a beautiful bull, who had such noble and tender sentiments, was unable to express them.

“Alas!” said she, in a low voice, “nothing is more common at court. One sees there every day fine lords who cannot converse, and contemptible wretches who speak with assurance.”

“This serpent,” said Mambres, “is not a contemptible wretch. He is perhaps the personage of the greatest importance.”

The day now declined, and the princess was obliged to return home, after having promised to come back next day at the same hour. Her ladies of the palace were astonished, and understood nothing of what they had seen or heard. Mambres made reflections. The princess, recollecting that the serpent called the old woman Miss, concluded at random that she was still unmarried, and felt some affliction that such was also her own condition. Respectable affliction! which she concealed, however, with as much care as the name of her lover.

Chapter III.

How The Beautiful Amasidia Had A Secret Conversation With A Beautiful Serpent.

The beautiful princess recommended secrecy to her ladies with regard to what they had seen. They all promised it, and kept their promise for a whole day.

We may believe that Amasidia slept little that night. An inexplicable charm continually recalled the idea of her beautiful bull. As soon, therefore, as she was at freedom with her wise Mambres, she said to him:

“O sage, this animal turns my head.”

“He employs mine very much,” said Mambres. “I see plainly that this bovine is very much superior to those of his species. I see that there is a great mystery, and I suspect a fatal event. Your father Amasis is suspicious and violent; and this affair requires that you conduct yourself with the greatest precaution.”

“Ah!” said the princess, “I have too much curiosity to be prudent. It is the only sentiment which can unite in my heart with that which preys upon me on account of the lover I have lost. May I not know who this white bull is that gives me such strange disquiet?”

Mambres replied:

“I have already confessed to you, frankly, that my knowledge declines in proportion as my age advances, but I mistake much if the serpent is not informed of what you are so very desirous of knowing. He does not want sense. He expresses himself with propriety. He has been long accustomed to interfere in the affairs of the ladies.”

“Ah! undoubtedly,” said Amasidia, “this is the beautiful serpent of Egypt, who, by fixing his tail into his mouth, becomes the emblem of eternity; who enlightens the world when he opens his eyes, and darkens it when he shuts them?”

“No, Miss.”

“It is then the serpent of Aesculapius?”

“Still less.”

“It is perhaps Jupiter under the figure of a serpent?”

“Not at all.”

“Ah, now I see, I see. It is the rod which you formerly changed into a sea serpent?”

“No, indeed, it is not; but all these serpents are of the same family. This one has a very high character in his own country. He passes there for the most extraordinary serpent that was ever seen. Address yourself to him. However, I warn you it is a dangerous undertaking. Were I in your place I would hardly trouble myself either with the bull, the she-ass, the he-goat, the serpent, the fish, the raven, or the pigeon. But passion hurries you on, and all I can do is to pity you, and tremble.”

The princess conjured him to procure her a tête-à-tête with the serpent. Mambres, who was obliging, consented, and, making profound reflections, he went and communicated to the witch in so insinuating a manner the whim of the princess, that the old woman told him Amasidia might lay her commands upon her; that the serpent was perfectly well-bred, and so polite to the ladies that he wished for nothing more than to oblige them, and would not fail to keep the princess’s appointment.

The ancient magician returned to inform the princess of this good news, but he still dreaded some misfortune, and made reflections.

“You desire to speak with the serpent, mademoiselle. This you may accomplish whenever your highness thinks proper. But remember you must flatter him, for every animal has a great deal of self-love, and the serpent in particular. It is said he was formerly driven out of heaven for excessive pride.”

“I have never heard of it,” replied the princess.

“I believe it,” said the old man.

He then informed her of all the reports which had been spread about this famous serpent. “But, my dear princess, whatever singular adventures may have happened to him, you never can extort these secrets from him but by flattery. Having formerly deceived women, it is equitable that a woman in her turn should deceive him.”

“I will do my utmost,” said the princess, and departed with her maids of honour. The old woman was feeding the bull at a considerable distance.

Mambres left Amasidia to herself, and went and discoursed with the witch. One lady of honour chatted with the she-ass, the others amused themselves with the goat, the dog, the raven, and the pigeon. As for the large fish that frightened everybody, he plunged himself into the Nile by order of the old woman.

The serpent then attended the beautiful Amasidia into the grove, where they had the following conversation:

SERPENT. You cannot imagine, mademoiselle, how much I am flattered with the honour which your highness deigns to confer upon me.

PRINCESS. Your great reputation, sir, the beauty of your countenance, and the brilliancy of your eyes have emboldened me to seek for this conversation. I know by public report (if it be not false) that you were formerly a very great lord in the empyrean heaven.

SERPENT. It is true, Miss, I had there a very distinguished place. It is pretended I am a disgraced favourite. This is a report which once went abroad in India. The Brahmins were the first who gave a history of my adventures. And I doubt not but one day or other the poets of the North will make them the subject of an extravagant epic poem, for in truth it is all that can be made of them. Yet I am not so much fallen but that I have left in this globe a very extensive dominion. I might venture to assert that the whole earth belongs to me.

PRINCESS. I believe it, for they tell me that your powers of persuasion are irresistible, and to please is to reign.

SERPENT. I feel, mademoiselle, while I behold and listen to you, that you have over me the same power which you ascribe to me over so many others.

PRINCESS. You are, I believe, an amiable conqueror. It is said that your conquests among the fair sex have been numerous, and that you began with our common mother, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten.

SERPENT. They do me injustice. She honoured me with her confidence, and I gave her the best advice. I desired that she and her husband should eat heartily of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. I imagined in doing this that I should please the Ruler of all things. It seemed to me that a tree so necessary to the human race was not planted to be entirely useless. Would the Supreme Being have wished to have been served by fools and idiots? Is not the mind formed for the acquisition of knowledge and for improvement? Is not the knowledge of good and evil necessary for doing the one and avoiding the other? I certainly merited their thanks.

PRINCESS. Yet they tell me that you have suffered for it. Probably it is since this period that so many ministers have been punished for giving good advice, and so many real philosophers and men of genius persecuted for their writings that were useful to mankind.

SERPENT. It is my enemies who have told you these stories. They say that I am out of favour at court. But a proof that my influence there has not declined is their own confession that I entered into the council when it was in agitation to try the good man Job; and I was again called upon when the resolution was taken to deceive a certain petty king called Ahab. I alone was charged with this honourable commission.

PRINCESS. Ah, sir! I do not believe that you are formed to deceive. But since you are always in the ministry, may I beg a favour of you? I hope so amiable a lord will not deny me.

SERPENT. Mademoiselle, your requests are laws; name your commands.

PRINCESS. I entreat that you will tell me who this white bull is, for whom I feel such extraordinary sentiments, which both affect and alarm me. I am told that you would deign to inform me.

SERPENT. Curiosity is necessary to human nature, and especially to your amiable sex. Without it they would live in the most shameful ignorance. I have always satisfied, as far as lay in my power, the curiosity of the ladies. I am accused, indeed, of using this complaisance only to vex the Ruler of the world. I swear to you that I could propose nothing more agreeable to myself than to obey you; but the old woman must have informed you that the revealing of this secret will be attended with some danger to you.

PRINCESS. Ah! it is that which makes me still more curious.

SERPENT. In this I discover the sex to whom I have formerly done service.

PRINCESS. If you possess any feeling; if rational beings should mutually assist each other; if you have compassion for an unfortunate creature, do not refuse my request.

SERPENT. You affect me. I must satisfy you; but do not interrupt me.

PRINCESS. I promise you I will not.

SERPENT. There was a young king, beautiful, charming, in love, beloved—

PRINCESS. A young king! beautiful, charming, in love, beloved! And by whom? And who was this king? How old was he? What has become of him? Where is his kingdom? What is his name?

SERPENT. See, I have scarce begun, and you have already interrupted me. Take care. If you have not more command over yourself, you are undone.

PRINCESS. Ah, pardon me, sir. I will not repeat my indiscretion. Go on, I beseech you.

SERPENT. This great king, the most valiant of men, victorious wherever he carried his arms, often dreamed when asleep, and forgot his dreams when awake. He wanted his magicians to remember and inform him what he had dreamed, otherwise he declared he would hang them; for that nothing was more equitable. It is now nearly seven years since he dreamed a fine dream, which he entirely forgot when he awoke; and a young Jew, full of experience, having revealed it to him, this amiable king was immediately changed into an ox for—

PRINCESS. Ah! it is my dear Neb—

She could not finish; she fainted away. Mambres, who listened at a distance, saw her fall, and believed her dead.

Chapter IV.

How They Wanted To Sacrifice The Bull And Exorcise The Princess.

Mambres runs to her, weeping. The serpent is affected. He, alas, cannot weep, but he hisses in a mournful tone. He cries out, “She is dead.” The ass repeats, “She is dead.” The raven tells it over again. All the other animals appeared afflicted except the fish of Jonah, which has always been merciless. The lady of honour, the ladies of the court, arrive and tear their hair. The white bull, who fed at a distance and heard their cries, ran to the grove, dragging the old woman after him, while his loud bellowings made the neighbouring echoes resound. To no purpose did the ladies pour upon the expiring Amasidia their bottles of rose-water, of pink, of myrtle, of benzoin, of balm of Gilead, of amomum, of gillyflower, of nutmeg, of ambergris. She had not as yet given the smallest signs of life. But as soon as she perceived that the beautiful white bull was beside her she came to herself, more blooming, more beautiful and lively than ever. A thousand times did she kiss this charming animal, who languishingly leaned his head on her snowy bosom. She called him, “My master, my king, my dear, my life!” She throws her fair arms around his neck, which was whiter than the snow. The light straw does not adhere more closely to the amber, the vine to the elm, nor the ivy to the oak. The sweet murmur of her sighs was heard. Her eyes were seen, now sparkling with a tender flame, and now obscured by those precious tears which love makes us shed.

We may easily judge into what astonishment the lady of honour and ladies of her train were thrown. As soon as they entered the palace they related to their lovers this extraordinary adventure, and every one with different circumstances, which increased its singularity, and which always contributes to the variety of all histories.

No sooner was Amasis, king of Tanis, informed of these events, than his royal breast was inflamed with just indignation. Such was the wrath of Minos when he understood that his daughter Pasiphae lavished her tender favours upon the father of the Minotaur. Thus raged Juno when she beheld Jupiter caressing the beautiful cow Io, daughter of the river Inachus. Following the dictates of passion, the stern Amasis imprisoned his unhappy daughter, the beautiful Amasidia, in her chamber, and placed over her a guard of black eunuchs. He then assembled his privy council.

The grand magician presided there, but had no longer the same influence as formerly. All the ministers of state concluded that this white bull was a sorcerer. It was quite the contrary. He was bewitched. But in delicate affairs they are always mistaken at court.

It was carried by a great majority that the princess should be exorcised, and the old woman and the bull sacrificed.

The wise Mambres contradicted not the opinion of the king and council. The right of exorcising belonged to him. He could delay it under some plausible pretence. The god Apis had lately died at Memphis. A good ox dies just like another ox. And it was not allowed to exorcise any person in Egypt until a new ox was found to replace the deceased.

It was decreed in the council to wait until the nomination should be made of a new god at Memphis.

The good old man, Mambres, perceived to what danger his dear princess was exposed. He knew who her lover was. The syllables Nebu— which had escaped her, laid open the whole mystery to the eyes of this sage.

The dynasty of Memphis belonged at this time to the Babylonians. They preserved this remainder of the conquests they had gained under the greatest king of the world, to whom Amasis was a mortal enemy. Mambres had occasion for all his wisdom to conduct himself properly in the midst of so many difficulties. If the king Amasis should discover the lover of his daughter, her death would be inevitable. He had sworn it. The great, the young, the beautiful king of whom she was enamoured, had dethroned the king, her father, and Amasis had only recovered his kingdom about seven years. From that time it was not known what had become of the adorable monarch the conqueror and idol of the nations the tender and generous lover of the charming Amasidia. Sacrificing the white bull would inevitably occasion the death of the beautiful princess.

What could Mambres do in such critical circumstances? He went, after the council had broken up, to find his dear foster-daughter.

“My dear child,” he says, “I will serve you, but I repeat it, they will behead you if ever you pronounce the name of your lover.”

“Ah! what signifies my neck,” replied the beautiful Amasidia, “if I cannot embrace that of Nebu? My father is a cruel man. He not only refuses to give me a charming prince whom I adore, but he declares war against him; and after he was conquered by my lover he has found the secret of changing him into an ox. Did one ever see more frightful malice? If my father were not my father, I do not know what I should do to him.”

“It was not your father who played him this cruel trick,” said the wise Mambres. “It was a native of Palestine, one of our ancient enemies, an inhabitant of a little country comprehended in that crowd of kingdoms which your lover subdued in order to polish and refine them.

“Such metamorphoses must not surprise you. You know that formerly I performed more extraordinary ones. Nothing was at that time more common than those changes which at present astonish philosophers. True history, which we have read together, informs us that Lycaon, king of Arcadia, was changed into a wolf; the beautiful Callisto, his daughter, into a bear; the daughter of Inachus, our venerable Isis, into a cow; Daphne into a laurel; Syrinx into a flute; the fair Edith, wife of Lot—the best and most affectionate husband and father ever known in the world—has she not become, in our neighbourhood, a pillar of salt, very sharp tasted, which has preserved both her likeness and form, as the great men attest who have seen it? I was witness to this change in my youth. I saw seven powerful cities in the most dry and parched situation in the world, all at once transformed into a beautiful lake. In the early part of my life the whole world was full of metamorphoses.

“In fine, madam, if examples can soothe your grief, remember that Venus changed Cerastes into an ox.”

“I do not know,” said the princess, “that examples comfort us. If my lover were dead, could I comfort myself by the idea that all men die?”

“Your pain may at least be alleviated,” replied the sage; “and since your lover has become an ox, it is possible from an ox he may become a man. As for me, I should deserve to be changed into a tiger or a crocodile if I did not employ the little power I have in the service of a princess worthy of the adoration of the world; if I did not labour for the beautiful Amasidia, whom I have nursed upon my knees, and whom fatal destiny exposes to such rude trials.”

Chapter V.

How The Wise Mambres Conducted Himself Wisely.

The sage Mambres, having said everything he could to comfort the princess, but without succeeding in so doing, ran to the old woman.

“My companion,” said he to her, “ours is a charming profession, but a very dangerous one. You run the risk of being hanged, and your ox of being burned, drowned or devoured. I don’t know what they will do with your other animals, for, prophet as I am, I know very little; but do you carefully conceal the serpent and the fish. Let not the one show his head above water, nor the other venture out of his hole. I will place the ox in one of my stables in the country. You shall be there with him, since you say that you are not allowed to abandon him. The good scapegoat may, upon this occasion, serve as an expiation. We will send him into the desert loaded with the sins of all the rest. He is accustomed to this ceremony, which does him no harm, and every one knows that sin is expiated by means of a he-goat, who walks about for his own amusement. I only beg of you to lend me immediately Tobit’s dog, who is a very swift greyhound; Balaam’s ass, who runs better than a dromedary; the raven and the pigeon of the ark, who fly with amazing swiftness. I want to send them on an embassy to Memphis. It is an affair of great consequence.”

The old woman replied to the magician:

“You may dispose as you please of Tobit’s dog, of Balaam’s ass, of the raven and the pigeon of the ark, and of the scapegoat; but my ox cannot enter into a stable. It is said, Daniel, v. 21, that he must be always made fast to an iron chain, be always wet with the dew of heaven, and eat the grass of the field, and his portion be with the wild beasts.

“He is intrusted to me, and I must obey. What would Daniel, Ezekiel and Jeremiah think of me if I trusted my ox to any other than to myself? I see you know the secret of this extraordinary animal, but I have not to reproach myself with having revealed it to you. I am going to conduct him far from this polluted land, toward the lake Sirbon, where he will be sheltered from the cruelties of the king of Tanis. My fish and my serpent will defend me. I fear nobody when I serve my master.”

“My good woman,” answered the wise Mambres, “let the will of God be done! Provided I can find your white bull again, the lake Sirbon, the lake Moeris, or the lake of Sodom are to me perfectly indifferent. I want to do nothing but good to him and to you. But why have you spoken to me of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah?”

“Ah! sir,” answered the old woman, “you know as well as I what concern they have in this important affair. But I have no time to lose. I don’t desire to be hanged. I want not that my bull should be burned, drowned, or devoured. I go to the lake Sirbon by Canopus, with my serpent and my fish. Adieu.”

The bull followed her pensively, after having testified his gratitude to the beneficent Mambres.

The wise Mambres was greatly troubled. He saw that Amasis, king of Tanis, distracted by the strange passion of his daughter for this animal, and believing her bewitched, would pursue everywhere the unfortunate bull, who would infallibly be burned as a sorcerer in the public place of Tanis, or given to the fish of Jonah, or be roasted and served up for food. Mambres wanted at all events to save the princess from this cruel disaster.

He wrote a letter, in sacred characters, to his friend, the high priest of Memphis, upon the paper of Egypt, which was not yet in use. Here are the identical words of this letter:

“Light of the world, lieutenant of Isis, Osiris, and Horus, chief of the circumcised, you whose altar is justly raised above all thrones! I am informed that your god, the ox Apis, is dead. I have one at your service. Come quickly with your priests to acknowledge, to worship him, and to conduct him into the stable of your temple. May Isis, Osiris, and Horus keep you in their holy and worthy protection, and likewise the priests of Memphis in their holy care.

“Your affectionate friend, Mambres.”

He made four copies of this letter, for fear of accidents, and enclosed them in cases of the hardest ebony. Then, calling to him his four couriers, whom he had destined for this employment (these were the ass, the dog, the raven, and the pigeon), he said to the ass:

“I know with what fidelity you served Balaam, my brother. Serve me as faithfully. There is not a unicorn who equals you in swiftness. Go, my dear friend, and deliver this letter to the person himself to whom it is directed, and return.”

The ass answered:

“Sir, as I served Balaam, I will serve you. I will go, and I will return.”

The sage put the box of ebony into her mouth, and she swiftly departed. He then called Tobit’s dog.

“Faithful dog,” said Mambres, “more speedy in thy course than the nimble-footed Achilles, I know what you performed for Tobit, son of Tobit, when you and the angel Raphael accompanied him from Nineveh to Ragusa, in Media, and from Ragusa to Nineveh, and that he brought back to his father ten talents, which the slave Tobit, the father, had lent to the slave Gabelus; for the slaves at that time were very rich. Carry this letter as it is directed. It is much more valuable than ten talents of silver.”

The dog then replied:

“Sir, if I formerly followed the messenger Raphael, I can with equal ease execute your commission.”

Mambres put the letter into his mouth.

He next spoke in the same manner to the pigeon, who replied:

“Sir, if I brought back a bough into the ark, I will likewise bring you back an answer.”

She took the letter in her bill, and the three messengers were out of sight in a moment. Then Mambres addressed the raven:

“I know that you fed the great prophet Elijah, when he was concealed near the torrent of Cherith, so much celebrated in the world. You brought him every day good bread and fat pullets. I only ask of you to carry this letter to Memphis.”

The raven answered in these words:

“It is true, sir, that I carried every day a dinner to the great prophet Elijah, the Tishbite. I saw him mount in a chariot of fire drawn by fiery horses, although this is not the usual method of travelling. But I always took care to eat half the dinner myself. I am very well pleased to carry your letter, provided you make me certain of two good meals every day, and that I am paid money in advance for my commission.”

Mambres, angry, replied:

“Gluttonous and malicious creature, I am not astonished that Apollo has made you black as a mole, after being white as a swan, as you were formerly, before you betrayed in the plains of Thessaly the beautiful Coronis, the unfortunate mother of Aesculapius. Tell me, did you eat ribs of beef and pullets every day when you were ten whole months in the ark?”

“Sir,” said the raven, “we had there very good cheer. They served up roast meat twice a day to all the fowls of my species who live upon nothing but flesh, such as the vultures, kites, eagles, buzzards, sparrow-hawks, owls, tercels, falcons, great owls, and an innumerable crowd of birds of prey. They furnished, with the most plentiful profusion, the tables of the lions, leopards, tigers, panthers, hyenas, wolves, bears, foxes, polecats, and all sorts of carnivorous quadrupeds. There were in the ark eight persons of distinction (and the only ones who were then in the world), continually employed in the care of our table and our wardrobe; Noah and his wife, who were about six hundred years old, their three sons and their three wives. It was charming to see with what care, what dexterity, what cleanliness, our eight domestics served four thousand of the most ravenous guests, without reckoning the amazing trouble which about ten or twelve thousand other animals required, from the elephant and the giraffe, to the silk-worm and fly. What astonishes me is, that our purveyor Noah is unknown to all the nations of whom he is the stem, but I don’t much mind it. I had already been present at a similar entertainment with Xesustres, king of Thrace, Such things as these happen from time to time for the instruction of ravens. In a word, I want to have good cheer, and to be paid in ready money.”

The wise Mambres took care not to give his letter to such a discontented and babbling animal; and they separated very much dissatisfied with each other.

But it is necessary to know what became of the white bull, and not to lose sight of the old woman and the serpent. Mambres ordered his intelligent and faithful domestics to follow them; and as for himself, he advanced in a litter by the side of the Nile, always making reflections.

“How is it possible,” said he to himself, “that a serpent should be master of almost all the world, as he boasts, and as so many learned men acknowledge, and that he nevertheless obeys an old woman? How is it, that he is sometimes called to the council of the Most High, while he creeps upon earth? In what manner can he enter by his power alone into the bodies of men, and that so many men pretend to dislodge him by means of words? In short, why does he pass with a small neighbouring people for having ruined the human race? And how is it that the human race are entirely ignorant of this? I am old, I have studied all my life, but I see a crowd of inconsistencies which I cannot reconcile. I cannot account for what has happened to myself, neither for the great things which I long ago performed, nor those of which I have been witness. Everything well considered, I begin to think that this world subsists by contradictions, rerum concordia discors, as my master Zoroaster formerly said.”

While he was plunged in this obscure metaphysical reasoning obscure like all metaphysics a boatman singing a jovial song, made fast a small boat by the side of the river, and three grave personages, half clothed in dirty, tattered garments, landed from it; but preserved, under the garb of poverty, the most majestic and august air. These strangers were Daniel, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah.

Chapter VI.

How Mambres Met Three Prophets, And Gave Them A Good Dinner.

These three great men who had the prophetic light in their countenance, knew the wise Mambres to be one of their brethren, by some marks of the same light which he had still remaining, and prostrated themselves before his litter. Mambres likewise knew them to be prophets, more by their uncouth dress, than by those gleams of fire which proceeded from their august heads. He conjectured that they came to learn news of the white bull; and conducting himself with his usual propriety, he alighted from his carriage and advanced a few steps towards them, with dignified politeness. He raised them up, caused tents to be erected, and prepared a dinner, of which he rightly judged that the prophets had very great need.

He invited the old woman to it, who was only about five hundred paces from them. She accepted the invitation, and arrived leading her white bull.

Two soups were served up, one de Bisque, and the other à la Reine. The first course consisted of a carp’s tongue pie, livers of eel-pouts, and pikes; fowls dressed with pistachios, pigeons with truffles and olives; two young turkeys with gravy of crayfish, mushrooms, and morels; and a chipolata. The second course was composed of pheasants, partridges, quails, and ortolans, with four salads; the épergne was in the highest taste; nothing could be more delicious than the side dishes; nothing more brilliant and more ingenious than the dessert. But the wise Mambres took great care to have no boiled beef, nor short ribs, nor tongue, nor palate of an ox, nor cow’s udder, lest the unfortunate monarch near at hand should think that they insulted him.

This great and unfortunate prince was feeding near the tent; and never did he feel in a more cruel manner the fatal revolution which had deprived him of his throne for seven long years.

“Alas,” said he to himself, “this Daniel who has changed me into a bull, and this sorceress, my keeper, make the best cheer in the world; while I, the sovereign of Asia, am reduced to the necessity of eating grass, and drinking water.”

When they had drunk heartily of the wine of Engaddi, of Tadmor, and of Shiraz, the prophets and the witch conversed with more frankness than at the first course.

“I must acknowledge,” said Daniel, “that I did not live so well in the lion’s den.”

“What, sir,” said Mambres, “did they put you into a den of lions? How came you not to be devoured?”

“Sir,” said Daniel, “you know very well that lions never eat prophets.”

“As for me,” said Jeremiah, “I have passed my whole life starving of hunger. This is the only day I ever ate a good meal; and were I to spend my life over again, and had it in my power to choose my condition, I must own I would much rather be comptroller-general or bishop of Babylon, than prophet at Jerusalem.”

Ezekiel cried, “I was once ordered to sleep three hundred and ninety days upon my left side, and to eat all that time bread of wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, cooked in the strangest manner. Still I must own that the cookery of Seigneur Mambres is much more delicate. However, the prophetic trade has its advantages, and the proof is, that there are many who follow it.”

After they had spoken thus freely, Mambres entered upon business. He asked the three pilgrims the reason of their journey into the dominions of the king of Tanis. Daniel replied, “That the kingdom of Babylon had been all in a flame since Nebuchadnezzar had disappeared; that according to the custom of the court, they had persecuted all the prophets, who passed their lives in sometimes seeing kings humbled at their feet, and sometimes receiving a hundred lashes from them; that at length they had been obliged to take refuge in Egypt for fear of being starved.”

Ezekiel and Jeremiah likewise spoke a long time in such fine terms, that it was almost impossible to understand them. As for the witch, she had always a strict eye over her charge. The fish of Jonah continued in the Nile, opposite to the tent, and the serpent sported upon the grass. After drinking coffee, they took a walk by the side of the Nile; and the white bull, perceiving the three prophets, his enemies, bellowed most dreadfully, ran furiously at them, and gored them with his horns. As prophets never have anything but skin upon their bones, he would certainly have run them through; but the ruler of the world, who sees all and remedies all, changed them immediately into magpies; and they continued to chatter as before. The same thing happened since to the Pierides; so much has fable always imitated sacred history.

This incident caused new reflections in the mind of Mambres.

“Here,” said he, “are three great prophets changed into magpies. This ought to teach us never to speak too much, and always to observe a suitable discretion.”

He concluded that wisdom was better than eloquence, and thought profoundly as usual; when a great and terrible spectacle presented itself to his eyes.

Chapter VII.

How King Amasis Wanted To Give The White Bull To Be Devoured By The Fish Of Jonah, And Did Not Do It.

Clouds of dust floated from south to north. The noise of drums, fifes, psalteries, harps, and sackbuts was heard. Several squadrons and battalions advanced, and Amasis, king of Tanis, was at their head upon an Arabian horse caparisoned with scarlet trappings embroidered with gold. The heralds proclaimed that they should seize the white bull, bind him, and throw him into the Nile, to be devoured by the fish of Jonah; “for the king our lord, who is just, wants to revenge himself upon the white bull, who has bewitched his daughter.”

The good old man Mambres made more reflections than ever. He saw very plainly that the malicious raven had told all to the king, and that the princess ran a great risk of being beheaded.

“My dear friend,” said he to the serpent, “go quickly and comfort the fair Amasidia, my foster daughter. Bid her fear nothing whatever may happen, and tell her stories to alleviate her inquietude; for stories always amuse the ladies, and it is only by interesting them that one can succeed in the world.”

Mambres next prostrated himself before Amasis, king of Tanis, and thus addressed him:

“O king, live forever! The white bull should certainly be sacrificed, for your majesty is always in the right; but the ruler of the world has said this bull must not be swallowed up by the fish of Jonah till Memphis shall have found a god to supply the place of him who is dead. Then thou shalt be revenged, and thy daughter exorcised, for she is possessed. Your piety is too great not to obey the commands of the ruler of the universe.”

Amasis, king of Tanis, remained for some time silent and in deep thought.

“The god Apis,” said he, at length, “is dead! God rest his soul! When do you think another ox will be found to reign over the fruitful Egypt?”

“Sire,” replied Mambres, “I ask but eight days.”

“I grant them to you,” replied the king, who was very religious, “and I will remain here the eight days. At the expiration of that time I will sacrifice the enemy of my daughter.”

Amasis immediately ordered that his tents, cooks, and musicians should be brought, and remained here eight days, as it is related in Manethon.

The old woman was in despair that the bull she had in charge had but eight days to live. She raised phantoms every night, in order to dissuade the king from his cruel resolution; but Amasis forgot in the morning the phantoms he had seen in the night; similar to Nebuchadnezzar, who had always forgotten his dreams.

Chapter VIII.

How The Serpent Told Stories To The Princess To Comfort Her.

Meanwhile the serpent told stories to the fair Amasidia to soothe her. He related to her how he had formerly cured a whole nation of the bite of certain little serpents, only by showing himself at the end of a staff (Num. xx. 9). He informed her of the conquests of a hero who made a charming contrast with Amphion, architect of Thebes. Amphion assembled hewn stones by the sound of his violin. To build a city he had only to play a rigadoon and a minuet; but the other hero destroyed them by the sound of rams’ horns. He executed thirty-one powerful kings in a country of four leagues in length and four in breadth. He made stones rain down from heaven upon a battalion of routed Amorites; and having thus exterminated them, he stopped the sun and moon at noonday between Gibeon and Ajalon, in the road to Beth-Horon, to exterminate them still more, after the example of Bacchus, who had stopped the sun and the moon in his journey to the Indies.

The prudence which every serpent ought to have did not allow him to tell the fair Amasidia of the powerful Jephthah, who made a vow and beheaded his daughter because he had gained a battle. This would have struck terror into the mind of the fair princess. But he related to her the adventures of the great Samson, who killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, who tied together three hundred foxes by the tail, and who fell into the snares of a lady, less beautiful, less tender, and less faithful than the charming Amasidia.

He related to her the story of the unfortunate Sechem and Dinah, as well as the more celebrated adventures of Ruth and Boaz; those of Judah and Tamar; those even of Lot’s two daughters; those of Abraham and Jacob’s servant maids; those of Reuben and Bilhah; those of David and Bathsheba; and those of the great King Solomon. In short, everything which could dissipate the grief of a fair princess.

Chapter IX.

How The Serpent Did Not Comfort The Princess.

“All these stories tire me,” said Amasidia, for she had understanding and taste. “They are good for nothing but to be commented upon among the Irish by that madman Abbadie, or among the Welsh by that prattler d’Houteville. Stories which might have amused the great-great-great-grandmother of my grandmother appear insipid to me who have been educated by the wise Mambres, and who have read Human Understanding, by the Egyptian philosopher named Locke, [2] and the Matron of Ephesus. I choose that a story should be founded on probability, and not always resemble a dream. I desire to find nothing in it trivial or extravagant; and I desire above all, that under the appearance of fable there may appear some latent truth, obvious to the discerning eye, though it escape the observation of the vulgar.

“I am weary of a sun and of a moon which an old beldam disposes of at her pleasure, of mountains which dance, of rivers which return to their sources, and of dead men who rise again; but I am above measure disgusted when such insipid stories are written in a bombastic and unintelligible manner. A lady who expects to see her lover swallowed up by a great fish, and who is apprehensive of being beheaded by her own father, has need of amusement; but suit my amusement to my taste.”

“You impose a difficult task upon me,” replied the serpent. “I could have formerly made you pass a few hours agreeably enough, but for some time past I have lost both my imagination and memory. Alas! what has become of those faculties with which I formerly amused the ladies? Let me try, however, if I can recollect one moral tale for your entertainment.

“Five and twenty thousand years ago King Gnaof and Queen Patra reigned in Thebes with its hundred gates. King Gnaof was very handsome, and Queen Patra still more beautiful. But their home was unblest with children, and no heirs were born to continue the royal race.

‘The members of the faculty of medicine and of the academy of surgery wrote excellent treatises upon this subject. The queen was sent to drink mineral waters; she fasted and prayed; she made magnificent presents to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, but all was to no purpose. At length a—”

“Mon Dieu!” said the princess, “but I see where this leads. This story is too common, and I must likewise tell you that it offends my modesty. Relate some very true and moral story, which I have never yet heard, to complete the improvement of my understanding and my heart, as the Egyptian professor Linro says.”

“Here, then, madam,” said the beautiful serpent, “is one most incontestably authentic.

“There were three prophets all equally ambitious and discontented with their condition. They had in common the folly to wish to be kings; for there is only one step from the rank of a prophet to that of a monarch, and man always aspires to the highest step in the ladder of fortune. In other respects their inclinations and their pleasures were totally different. The first preached admirably to his assembled brethren, who applauded him by clapping their hands, the second was distractedly fond of music, and the third was a passionate lover of the fair sex.

“The angel Ithuriel presented himself one day to them when they were at table discoursing on the sweets of royalty.

‘“The Ruler of the World,’ said the angel to them, ‘sends me to reward your virtue. Not only shall you be kings, but you shall constantly satisfy your ruling passions. You, first prophet, I make king of Egypt, and you shall continually preside in your council, who shall applaud your eloquence and your wisdom; and you, second prophet, I make king over Persia, and you shall continually hear most heavenly music; and you, third prophet, I make king of India, and I give you a charming mistress who shall never forsake you.’

“He to whose lot Egypt fell began his reign by assembling his council, which was composed only of two hundred sages. He made them a long and eloquent speech, which was very much applauded, and the monarch enjoyed the pleasing satisfaction of intoxicating himself with praises uncorrupted by flattery.

“The council for foreign affairs succeeded to the privy council. This was much more numerous, and a new speech received still greater encomiums. And it was the same in the other councils. There was not a moment of intermission in the pleasures and glory of the prophet king of Egypt. The fame of his eloquence filled the world.

“The prophet king of Persia began his reign by an Italian opera, whose choruses were sung by fifteen hundred eunuchs. Their voices penetrated his soul even to the very marrow of the bones, where it resides. To this opera succeeded another, and to the second a third, without interruption.

“The king of India shut himself up with his mistress, and enjoyed perfect pleasure in her society. He considered the necessity of always flattering her as the highest felicity, and pitied the wretched situation of his two brethren, of whom one was obliged always to convene his council, and the other to be continually at an opera.

“It happened at the end of a few days that each of these kings became disgusted with his occupation, and beheld from his window certain woodcutters who came from an ale-house, and who were going to work in a neighbouring forest. They walked arm in arm with their sweethearts, with whom they were happy. The kings begged of the angel Ithuriel that he would intercede with the Ruler of the World, and make them wood-cutters.”

“I do not know whether the Ruler of the World granted their request or not,” interrupted the tender Amasidia, “and I do not care much about it, but I know very well that I should ask for nothing of any one were I with my lover, with my dear NEBUCHADNEZZAR!”

The vaults of the palace resounded this mighty name. At first Amasidia had only pronounced Ne afterwards Neb then Nebu. At length passion hurried her on, and she pronounced entire the fatal name, notwithstanding the oath she had sworn to the king, her father. All the ladies of the court repeated Nebuchadnezzar, and the malicious raven did not fail to carry the tidings to the king. The countenance of Amasis, king of Tanis, sunk, because his heart was troubled. And thus it was that the serpent, the wisest and most subtle of animals, always beguiled the women, thinking to do them service.

Amasis, in a fury, sent twelve alguazils for his daughter. These men are always ready to execute barbarous orders, because they are paid for it.

Chapter X.

How They Wanted To Behead The Princess, And Did Not Do It.

No sooner had the princess entered the camp of the king, than he said to her: “My daughter, you know that all princesses who disobey their fathers are put to death; without which it would be impossible that a kingdom could be well governed. I charged you never to mention the name of your lover, Nebuchadnezzar, my mortal enemy, who dethroned me about seven years ago, and disappeared. In his place you have chosen a white bull, and you have cried Nebuchadnezzar. It is just that I behead you.”

The princess replied: “My father, thy will be done; but grant me some time to bewail my sad fate.”

“That is reasonable,” said King Amasis; “and it is a rule established among the most judicious princes. I give you a whole day to bewail your destiny, since it is your desire. To-morrow, which is the eighth day of my encampment, I will cause the white bull to be swallowed up by the fish, and I will behead you precisely at nine o’clock in the morning.”

The beautiful Amasidia then went forth in sorrow, to bewail her father’s cruelty, and wandered by the side of the Nile, accompanied by the ladies of her train.

The wise Mambres pondered beside her, and reckoned the hours and the moments.

“Well! my dear Mambres,” said she to him, “you have changed the waters of the Nile into blood, according to custom, and cannot you change the heart of Amasis, king of Tanis, my father? Will you suffer him to behead me to-morrow, at nine o’clock in the morning?”

“That depends,” replied the reflecting Mambres, “upon the speed and diligence of my couriers.”

The next day, as soon as the shadows of the obelisks and pyramids marked upon the ground the ninth hour of the day, the white bull was securely bound, to be thrown to the fish of Jonah; and they brought to the king his large sabre.

“Alas! alas!” said Nebuchadnezzar to himself, “I, a king, have been a bull for nearly seven years; and scarcely have I found the mistress I had lost when I am condemned to be devoured by a fish.”

Never had the wise Mambres made such profound reflections; and he was quite absorbed in his melancholy thoughts when he saw at a distance all he expected. An innumerable crowd drew nigh. Three figures of Isis, Osiris, and Horus, joined together, advanced, drawn in a carriage of gold and precious stones by a hundred senators of Memphis, preceded by a hundred girls playing upon the sacred sistrums. Four thousand priests, with their heads shaved, were each mounted upon a hippopotamus.

At a great distance appeared with the same pomp the sheep of Thebes, the dog of Bubastis, the cat of Phoebe, the crocodile of Arsinoe, the goat of Mendes, and all the inferior gods of Egypt, who came to pay homage to the great ox, to the mighty Apis, as powerful as Isis, Osiris, and Horus, united together.

In the midst of the demi-gods, forty priests carried an enormous basket, filled with sacred onions. These were, it is true, gods, but they resembled onions very much.

On both sides of this aisle of gods, followed by an innumerable crowd of people, marched forty thousand warriors, with helmets on their heads, scimitars upon their left thighs, quivers at their shoulders, and bows in their hands.

All the priests sang in chorus, with a harmony which ravished the soul, and which melted it,

“Alas! alas! our ox is dead

We’ll have a finer in its stead.”

And at every pause was heard the sound of the sistrums, of cymbals, of tabors, of psalteries, of bagpipes, harps, and sackbuts.

Amasis, king of Tanis, astonished at this spectacle, beheaded not his daughter. He sheathed his scimitar.

Chapter XI

Apotheosis Of The White Bull. Triumph Of The Wise Mambres. The Seven Years Proclaimed By Daniel Are Accomplished. Nebuchadnezzar Resumes The Human Form, Marries The Beautiful Amasidia, And Ascends The Throne Of Babylon.

“Great king,” said Mambres to him, “the order of things is now changed. Your majesty must set the example. O king! quickly unbind the white bull, and be the first to adore him.”

Amasis obeyed, and prostrated himself with all his people. The high priest of Memphis presented to the new god Apis the first handful of hay; the Princess Amasidia tied to his beautiful horns festoons of roses, anemones, ranunculaceae, tulips, pinks, and hyacinths. She took the liberty to kiss him, but with a profound respect. The priests strewed palms and flowers on the road by which they were to conduct him to Memphis. And the wise Mambres, still making reflections, whispered to his friend the serpent:

“Daniel changed this monarch into a bull, and I have changed this bull into a god!”

They returned to Memphis in the same order, and the king of Tanis, in some confusion, followed the band. Mambres, with a serene and diplomatic air, walked by his side. The old woman came after, much amazed. She was accompanied by the serpent, the dog, the she-ass, the raven, the pigeon, and the scape-goat. The great fish mounted up the Nile. Daniel, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, changed into magpies, brought up the rear.

When they had reached the frontiers of the kingdom, which are not far distant, King Amasis took leave of the bull Apis, and said to his daughter:

“My daughter, let us return into my dominions, that I may behead you, as it has been determined in my royal breast, because you have pronounced the name of Nebuchadnezzar, my enemy, who dethroned me seven years ago. When a father has sworn to behead his daughter, he must either fulfil his oath or sink into hell forever, and I will not damn myself out of love for you.”

The fair Princess Amasidia replied to the King Amasis:

“My dear father, whom it pleases you go and behead, but it shall not be me. I am now in the territories of Isis, Osiris, Horus, and Apis. I will never forsake my beautiful white bull, and I will continue to kiss him, till I have seen his apotheosis in his stable in the holy city of Memphis. It is a weakness pardonable in a young lady of high birth.”

Scarce had she spoken these words, when the ox Apis cried out:

“My dear Amasidia, I will love you whilst J. live!”

This was the first time that the god Apis had been heard to speak during the forty thousand years that he had been worshipped.

The serpent and the she-ass cried out, “The seven years are accomplished!” And the three magpies repeated, “The seven years are accomplished!”

All the priests of Egypt raised their hands to heaven.

The god on a sudden was seen to lose his two hind legs, his two fore legs were changed into two human legs; two white muscular arms grew from his shoulders; his taurine visage was changed to the face of a charming hero; and he once more became the most beautiful of mortals.

“I choose,” cried he, “rather to be the lover of the beautiful Amasidia than a god. I am NEBUCHADNEZZAR, KING OF KINGS!”

This metamorphosis astonished all the world except the wise Mambres. But what surprised nobody was that Nebuchadnezzar immediately married the fair Amasidia in presence of this assembly.

He left his father-in-law in quiet possession of the kingdom of Tanis, and made noble provision for the she-ass, the serpent, the dog, the pigeon, and even for the raven, the three magpies, and the large fish; showing to all the world that he knew how to forgive as well as to conquer.

The old woman had a considerable pension placed at her disposal.

The scape-goat was sent for a day into the wilderness, that all past sins might be expiated; and had afterwards twelve sprightly goats for his companions.

The wise Mambres returned to his palace and made reflections.

Nebuchadnezzar, after having embraced the magician, his benefactor, governed in tranquillity the kingdoms of Memphis, Babylon, Damascus, Balbec, Tyre, Syria, Asia Minor, Scythia, the countries of Thiras, Mosok, Tubal, Madai, Gog, Magog, Javan, Sogdiana, Aroriana, the Indies, and the Isles; and the people of this vast empire cried out aloud every morning at the rising of the sun:

“Long live great Nebuchadnezzar, king of kings, who is no longer an ox!”

Since which time it has been a custom in Babylon, when the sovereign, deceived by his satraps, his magicians, treasurers or wives, at length acknowledges his errors, and amends his conduct, for all the people to cry out at his gate:

“Long live our great king, who is no longer an ox!”

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS.

L' Homme aux quarante écus

(1768)

Chapter I.

National Poverty.

An old man, who is forever pitying the present times, and extolling the past, was saying to me: “Friend, France is not so rich as it was under Henry IV.”

“And why?”

“Because the lands are not so well cultivated; because hands are wanting for the cultivation; and because the day-labourer having raised the price of his work, many land-owners let their inheritances lie fallow.”

“Whence comes this scarcity of hands?”

“From this, that whoever finds in himself anything of a spirit of industry, takes up the trade of embroiderer, chaser, watchmaker, silk-weaver, attorney, or divine. It is also because the revocation of the Edict of Nantes has left a great void in the kingdom; because nuns and beggars of all kinds have greatly multiplied; because the people in general avoid as much as possible the hard labour of cultivation, for which we are born by God’s destination, and which we have rendered ignominious by our own opinions; so very wise are we!

“Another cause of our poverty lies in our new wants. We pay our neighbours four millions of livres on one article, and five or six upon another; such, for example, as a stinking powder for stuffing up our noses, brought from America. Our coffee, tea, chocolate, cochineal, indigo, spices, cost us above sixty millions a year. All these were unknown to us in the reign of Henry IV, except the spices, of which, however, the consumption was not so great as it is now. We burn a hundred times more wax-lights than were burnt then, and get more than half of the wax from foreign countries, because we neglect our own hives. We see a hundred times more diamonds in the ears, round the necks, and on the hands of our city ladies of Paris, and other great towns, than were worn by all the ladies of Henry IV’s court, the queen included. Almost all the superfluities are necessarily paid for with ready specie.

“Observe especially that we pay to foreigners above fifteen millions of annuities on the Hôtel de Ville, and that Henry IV, on his accession, having found two millions of debt in all on this imaginary hotel, very wisely paid off a part, to ease the state of this burden.

“Consider that our civil wars were the occasion of the treasures of Mexico being poured into the kingdom, when Don Philip el Discrete took it into his head to buy France, and that since that time our foreign wars have eased us of a good half of our money.

“These are partly the causes of pure poverty a poverty which we hide under varnished ceilings, or with the help of our dealers in fashion. We are poor with taste. There are some officers of revenue, there are contractors or jobbers, there are merchants, very rich; their children, their sons-in-law, are also very rich; but the nation in general is unfortunately not so.”

This old man’s discourse, well or ill grounded, made a deep impression on me; for the curate of my parish, who had always had a friendship for me, had taught me a little of geometry and of history; and I began to reflect a little, which is very rare in my province. I do not know whether he was right or not in everything, but being very poor, I could very easily believe that I had a great many companions in my misery.

Chapter II.

Disaster Of The Man Of Forty Crowns.

I very readily make known to the universe that I have a landed estate which would yield me forty crowns a year, were it not for the tax laid on it.

There came forth several edicts from certain persons, who, having nothing better to do, govern the state at their fireside. The preamble of these edicts was, “that the legislative and executive was born, jure divino, the co-proprietor of my land”; and that I owe it at least the half of what I possess. The enormity of this legislative and executive power made me bless myself. What would it be if that power which presides over “the essential order of society,” were to take the whole of my little estate? The one is still more divine than the other. [3]

The comptroller-general knows that I used to pay in all but twelve livres; that even this was a heavy burden on me, and that I should have sunk under it, if God had not given me the talent of making wicker baskets, which helped to carry me through my trials. But how should I, on a sudden, be able to give the king twenty crowns?

The new ministers also said in their preamble that it was not fit to tax anything but the land, because everything arises from the land, even rain itself, and consequently that nothing was properly liable to taxation but the fruits of the land.

During the last war one of their collectors came to my house, and demanded of me, for my quota, three measures of corn and a sack of beans, the whole worth twenty crowns, to maintain the war of which I never knew the reason, having only heard it said that there was nothing to be got by it for our country, and a great deal to lose. As I had not at that time either corn, or beans, or money, the legislative and executive power had me dragged to prison; and the war went on as well as it could.

On my release from the dungeon, being nothing but skin and bone, whom should I meet but a jolly fresh-coloured man in a coach and six? He had six footmen, to each of whom he gave for his wages more than the double of my revenue. His head steward, who, by the way, looked in as good plight as himself, had of him a salary of two thousand livres, and robbed him every year of twenty thousand more. His mistress had in six months stood him in forty thousand crowns. I had formerly known him when he was less well-to-do than myself. He owned, by way of comfort to me, that he enjoyed four hundred thousand livres a year.

“I suppose, then,” said I, “that you pay out of this income two hundred thousand to the state, to help to support that advantageous war we are carrying on, since I, who have but just a hundred and twenty livres a year, am obliged to pay half of them.”

“I?” said he, “I contribute to the wants of the state? You are surely jesting, my friend. I have inherited from an uncle his fortune of eight millions, which he got at Cadiz and at Surat; I have not a foot of land; my estate lies in government contracts and in the funds. I owe the state nothing. It is for you to give half of your substance you who are a proprietor of land. Do you not see that if the minister of the revenue were to require anything of me in aid of our country, he would be a blockhead that could not calculate? for everything is the produce of the land. Money and the paper currency are nothing but pledges of exchange… If, after having laid the sole tax, the tax that is to supply the place of all others, on those commodities, the government were to ask money of me, do you not see that this would be a double load? that it would be asking the same thing twice over? My uncle sold at Cadiz to the amount of two millions of your corn, and of two millions of stuffs made of your wool; upon these two articles he gained 100 per cent. You must easily think that this profit came out of lands already taxed. What my uncle bought for ten pence of you, he sold again for above fifty livres at Mexico; and thus he made a shift to return to his own country with eight millions clear.

“You must be sensible, then, that it would be a horrid injustice to re-demand of him a few farthings on the ten pence he paid you. If twenty nephews like me, whose uncles had gained each eight millions at Buenos Ayres, at Lima, at Surat, or at Pondicherry, were, in the urgent necessities of the state, each to lend to it only two hundred thousand livres, that would produce four millions. But what horror would that be! Pay then thou, my friend, who enjoys quietly the neat and clear revenue of forty crowns; serve thy country well, and come now and then to dine with my servants in livery.”

This plausible discourse made me reflect a good deal, but I cannot say it much comforted me.

Chapter III.

Conversation With A Geometrician.

It sometimes happens that a man has no answer to make, and yet is not persuaded. He is overthrown without the feeling of being convinced. He feels at the bottom of his heart a scruple, a repugnance, which hinders him from believing what has been proved to him. A geometrician demonstrates to you that between a circle and a tangent you may thread a number of curves, and yet cannot get one straight line to pass. Your eyes, your reason, tell you the contrary. The geometrician gravely answers you that it is an infinitesimal of the second order. You stare in stupid silence and quit the field all astonished, without having any clear idea, without comprehending anything, and without having any reply to make.

Consult but a geometrician of more candour, and he explains the mystery to you.

“We suppose,” says he, “what cannot be in nature, lines which have length without breadth. Naturally and philosophically speaking, it is impossible for one real line to penetrate another. No curve, nor no right line, can pass between two real lines that touch one another. These theorems that puzzle you are but sports of the imagination, ideal chimeras, whereas true geometry is the art of measuring things actually existent.”

I was perfectly well satisfied with the confession of the sensible mathematician, and, with all my misfortune, could not help laughing on learning that there was a quackery even in that science which is called the sublime science. My geometrician was a kind of philosophical patriot, who had deigned to chat with me sometimes in my cottage. I said to him:

“Sir, you have tried to enlighten the cockneys of Paris on a point of the greatest concern to mankind: that of the duration of human life. It is to you alone that the ministry owes its knowledge of the due rate of annuities for lives, according to different ages. You have proposed to furnish the houses in town with what water they may want, and to deliver us at length from the shame and ridicule of hearing water cried about the streets, and of seeing women enclosed within an oblong hoop, carrying two pails of water, both together of about thirty pounds weight, up to a fourth storey. Be so good, in the name of friendship, to tell me how many two-handed bipeds there may be in France?”

THE GEOMETRICIAN. It is assumed that there may be about twenty millions, and I am willing to adopt this calculation as the most profitable, till it can be verified, which it would be very easy to do, and which, however, has not hitherto been done, because one does not always think of everything.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. How many acres, think you, the whole territory of France contains?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. One hundred and thirty millions, of which almost half is in roads, in towns, villages, moors, heaths, marshes, sands, barren lands, useless convents, gardens of more pleasure than profit, uncultivated grounds, and bad grounds ill cultivated. We might reduce all the land which yields good returns to seventy-five millions of square acres; but let us state them at fourscore millions. One cannot do too much for one’s country.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. How much may you think each acre brings in yearly, one year with another, in corn, seeds of all kinds, wine, fishponds, wood, metals, cattle, fruit, wool, silk, oil, milk, clear of all charges, without reckoning the tax?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Why, if they produce each twenty-five livres (about twenty English shillings) it is a great deal; but not to discourage our countrymen, let us put them at thirty livres. There are acres which produce constantly regenerating value, and which are estimated at three hundred livres; there are others which only produce three livres. The mean proportion between three and three hundred is thirty, for you must allow that three is to thirty as thirty is to three hundred. If, indeed, there were comparatively many acres at thirty livres, and very few at three hundred, our account would not hold good; but, once more, I would not be over-punctilious.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. Well, sir, how much will these fourscore millions of acres yield of revenue, estimated in money?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. The account is ready made; they will produce two thousand four hundred millions of livres of the present currency.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS I have read that Solomon possessed, of his own property, twenty-five thousand millions of livres, in ready money; and certainly there are not two thousand four hundred millions of specie circulating in France, which, I am told, is much greater and much richer than Solomon’s country.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. There lies the mystery. There may be about nine hundred millions circulating throughout the kingdom, and this money, passing from hand to hand, is sufficient to pay for all the produce of the land and of industry. The same crown may pass ten times from the pocket of the cultivator into that of the ale-housekeeper and of the tax-gatherer.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. I apprehend you. But you told me that we are, in all, about twenty millions of inhabitants, men, women, old and young. How much, pray, do you allow for each?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. One hundred and twenty livres, or forty crowns.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. You have just guessed my revenue. I have four acres, which, reckoning the fallow years with those of produce, bring me in one hundred and twenty livres, which is little enough, God knows.

But if every individual were to have his contingent, would that be no more than five louis d’ors a year?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Certainly not, according to our calculation, which I have a little amplified. Such is the state of human nature. Our life and our fortune have narrow limits. In Paris they do not, one with another, live above twenty-two or twenty-three years; and, one with another, have not, at the most, above a hundred and twenty livres a year to spend. So that your food, your raiment, your lodging, your movables, are all represented by the sum of one hundred and twenty livres.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. Alas! What have I done to you, that you thus abridge me of my fortune and life? Can it then be true that I have but three and twenty years to live, unless I rob my fellow-creatures of their share?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. This is incontestable in the good city of Paris. But from these twenty-three years you must deduct ten, at the least, for your childhood, as childhood is not an enjoyment of life; it is a preparation; it is the porch of the edifice; it is the tree that has not yet given fruits; it is the dawn of a day. Then again, from the thirteen years which remain to you, deduct the time of sleep, and that of tiresomeness of life, and that will be at least a moiety. You will then have six years and a half left to pass in vexation, in pain, in some pleasures, and in hopes.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. Merciful heaven! At this rate your account does not allow us above three years of tolerable existence.

THE GEOMETRICIAN That is no fault of mine. Nature cares very little for individuals. There are insects which do not live above one day, but of which the species is perpetual. Nature resembles those great princes who reckon as nothing the loss of four hundred thousand men, so they but accomplish their august designs.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. Forty crowns and three years of life! What resource can you imagine against two such curses?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. As to life, it would be requisite to render the air of Paris more pure; that men should eat less and take more exercise; that mothers should suckle their own children; that people should be no longer so ill-advised as to dread inoculation. This is what I have already said, and as to fortune, why, even marry and rear a family.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. How! Can the way to live more at ease be to associate to my own bad circumstances those of others?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Five or six bad circumstances put together form a tolerable establishment. Get a good wife, and we will say only two sons and two daughters. This will make seven hundred and twenty livres for your little family; that is to say, if distributive justice were to take place, and that each individual had a hundred and twenty livres a year. Your children, in their infancy, stand you in almost nothing; when grown up they will ease and help you. Their mutual aid will save you a good part of your expenses, and you may live very happily, like a philosopher. Always provided, however, that those worthy gentlemen who govern the state have not the barbarity to extort from each of you twenty crowns a year. But the misfortune is, we are no longer in the golden age, where the men, born all equals, had an equal part in the nutritive productions of uncultivated land. The case is now far from being so good a one, as that every two-handed biped possesses land to the value of a hundred and twenty livres a year.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. ‘Sdeath! You ruin us. You said but just now that in a country of fourscore millions of inhabitants each of them ought to enjoy a hundred and twenty livres a year, and now you take them away from us again.

THE GEOMETRICIAN I was computing according to the registers of the golden age, but we must reckon according to that of iron. There are many inhabitants who have but the value of ten crowns a year, others no more than four or five, and above six millions of men who have absolutely nothing.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. Nothing? Why, they would perish of hunger in three days’ time.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Not in the least. The others, who possess their portions, set them to work and share with them. It is from this arrangement that the pay comes for the divine, the confectioner, the apothecary, the preacher, the actor, the attorney, and the hackney-coachman. You thought yourself very ill off to have no more than a hundred and twenty livres a year, reduced to a hundred and eight by your tax of twelve livres. But consider the soldiers who devote their blood to their country at the rate of fourpence a day. They have not above sixty-three livres a year for their livelihood, and yet they make a comfortable shift, by a number of them joining their little stock and living in common.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. So, then, an ex-Jesuit has more than five times the pay of a soldier. And yet the soldiers have done more service to the state under the eyes of the king at Fontenoy, at Lawfeld, at the siege of Fribourg, than the reverend father Lavalette ever did in his life.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Nothing can be truer; nay, every one of these turned-adrift Jesuits, having now become free, has more to spend than what he cost his convent. There are even some among them who have gained a good deal of money by scribbling pamphlets against the parliaments, as, for example, the reverend father Patouillet, and the reverend father Nonnotte. In short,, in this world every one sets his wits to work for a livelihood. One

is at the head of a manufactory of stuffs; another of porcelain; another undertakes the opera; another the Ecclesiastical Gazette; another a tragedy in familiar life, or a novel or romance in the English style. This maintains the stationer, the ink-maker, the bookseller, the hawker, who might else be reduced to beggary. There is nothing, then, but the restitution of the hundred and twenty livres to those who have nothing that makes the state flourish.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. A pretty way of flourishing, truly!

THE GEOMETRICIAN. And yet there is no other. In every country it is the rich that enable the poor to live. This is the soul source of the industry of commerce. The more industrious a nation itself is, the more it gains from foreign countries. Could we, on our foreign trade, get ten millions a year by the balance in our favour, there would, in twenty years, be two hundred millions more in the nation. This would afford ten livres a head more, on the supposition of an equitable distribution. That is to say, that the dealers would make each poor person earn ten livres the more, once paid, in the hopes of making still more considerable gains. But commerce, like the fertility of the earth, has its bounds, otherwise its progression would be ad infinitum. Nor, besides, is it clear that the balance of our trade is constantly favourable to us. There are times in which we lose.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. I have heard much talk of population. If our inhabitants were doubled, so that we numbered forty millions of people instead of twenty, what would be the consequence?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. It would be this: that, one with another, each would have, instead of forty, but twenty crowns to live upon; or that the land should produce double the crops it now does; or that there should be double the national industry, or of gain from foreign countries; or that half of the people should be sent to America; or that one-half of the nation should eat the other.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. Let us then remain satisfied with our twenty millions of inhabitants, and with our hundred and twenty livres a head, distributed as it shall please the Lord. Yet this situation is a sad one, and your iron age is hard indeed.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. There is no nation that is better off, and there are many that are worse. Do you believe that there is in the north wherewithal to afford to each inhabitant the value of a hundred and twenty of our livres a year? If they had had the equivalent of this, the Huns, the Vandals, and the Franks would not have deserted their country in quest of establishments elsewhere, which they, conquered, fire and sword in hand.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. If I were to listen to you, you would persuade me presently that I am happy with my hundred and twenty livres.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. If you would but think yourself happy you would then be so.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS A man cannot imagine what actually is not, unless he be mad.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. I have already told you that, in order to be more at your ease, and more happy than you are, you should take a wife; to which I tack, however, this clause: that she has, as well as you, one hundred and twenty livres a year; that is to say, four acres at ten crowns an acre. The ancient Romans had each but one. If your children are industrious they can each earn as much by their working for others.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. So that they may get money without others losing it.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Such is the law of all nations; there is no living but on these terms.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. And must my wife and I give each of us the half of our produce to the legislative and executive power, and the new ministers of state rob us of the price of our hard labour, and of the substance of our poor children, before they are able to get their livelihood? Pray tell me, how much money will these new ministers of ours bring into the king’s coffers by this jure divino system?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. You pay twenty crowns on four acres which bring you in forty. A rich man, who possesses four hundred acres, will, by the new tariff, pay two thousand crowns, and the whole fourscore millions of acres will yield to the king twelve hundred millions of livres a year, or four hundred millions of crowns.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. That appears to me impracticable and impossible.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. And very much you are in the right to think so; and this impossibility is a geometrical demonstration that there is a fundamental defect in the calculation of our new ministers.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. Is not there also demonstrably a prodigious injustice in taking from me the half of my corn, of my hemp, of the wool of my sheep, etc., and at the same time to require no aid from those who shall have gained ten, twenty, or thirty thousand livres a year, by my hemp, of which they will have made linen; by my wool, of which they will have made cloth; by my corn, which they will have sold at so much more than it cost them?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. The injustice of this administration is as evident as its calculation is erroneous. It is right to favour industry, but opulent industry ought to contribute to support the state. This industry will have certainly taken from you a part of your one hundred and twenty livres, and appropriated that part to itself, in selling you your shirts and your coat twenty times dearer than they would have cost you if you had made them yourself. The manufacturer who shall have enriched himself at your expense will, I allow, have also paid wages to his workmen, who had nothing of themselves; but he will, every year, have sunk and put by a sum that we’ll, at length, have produced to him thirty thousand livres a year. This fortune, then, he will have acquired at your expense. Nor can you ever sell him the produce of your land dear enough to reimburse you for what he will have got by you; for were you to attempt such an advance of your price he would procure what he wanted cheaper from other countries. A proof of which is, that he remains constantly possessor of his thirty thousand livres a year, and you of your one hundred and twenty livres, that often diminish instead of increasing.

It is then necessary and equitable that the refined industry of the trader should pay more than the gross industry of the farmer. The same is to be said of the collectors of the revenue. Your tax had previously been but twelve livres, before our great ministers were pleased to take from you twenty crowns. Of these twelve livres the collector retained tenpence, or ten sols, for himself. If in your province there were five hundred thousand souls he will have gained two hundred and fifty thousand livres a year. Suppose he spends fifty thousand; it is clear that at the end of ten years he will be two millions in pocket. It is then but just that he should contribute his proportion, otherwise everything would be perverted and go to ruin.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. I am very glad you have taxed the officer of the revenue. It is some relief to my imagination. But since he has so well increased his superfluity, what shall I do to augment my small modicum?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. I have already told you by marrying, by labouring, by trying to procure from your land some sheaves of corn in addition to what it previously produced.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. Well! granted, then, that I shall have been duly industrious; that all my countrymen will have been so too; and that the legislative and executive power shall have received a good round tax; how much will the nation have gained at the end of the year?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Nothing at all, unless it shall have carried on a profitable foreign trade. But life will have been more agreeable in it. Every one will, respectively, in proportion, have had more clothes, more linen, more movables than he had before. There will have been in the nation a more abundant circulation. The wages would have been, in process of time, augmented, nearly in proportion to the number of the sheaves of corn, of the tods of wool, of the ox-hides, of the sheep and goats, that will have been added; of the clusters of grapes that will have been squeezed in the wine-press. More of the value of commodities will have been paid to the king in money, and the king will have returned more value to those he will have employed under his orders; but there will not be half a crown the more in the kingdom.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. What will then remain to the government at the end of the year?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Once more, nothing. This is the case of government in general. It never lays by anything. It will have got its living that is to say, its food, raiment, lodging, movables. The subject will have done so, too. Where a government amasses treasure, it will have squeezed from the circulation so much money as it will have amassed. It will have made so many wretched as it will have put by forty crowns in its coffers.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. At this rate, then, Henry IV was but a mean-spirited wretch, a miser, a plunderer; for I have been told that he had chested up in the Bastille above fifty millions of livres according to our present currency.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. He was a man as good and as prudent as he was brave. He was preparing to make a just war, and by amassing in his coffers twenty-two millions of the currency of that time, besides which he had twenty more to receive, which he left in circulation, he spared the people above a hundred millions that it would have cost if he had not taken those useful measures. He made himself morally sure of success against an enemy who had not taken the like precaution. The probabilities were prodigiously in his favour. His twenty-two millions in bank proved that there was then in this kingdom. twenty-two millions of surplusage of the territorial produce, so that no one was a sufferer.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. My father then told me the truth when he said that the subject was in proportion more rich under the administration of the Duke of Sully than under that of our new ministers, who laid on the single tax, the sole tax, and who, out of my forty crowns, have taken away twenty. Pray tell me, is there another nation in the world that enjoys this precious advantage of the sole tax?

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Not one opulent nation. The English, who are not much given to laughing, could not, however, help bursting out when they heard that men of intelligence among us had proposed this kind of administration. The Chinese exact a tax from all the foreign trading ships that resort to Canton. The Dutch pay, at Nagasaki, when they are received in Japan, under pretext that they are not Christians. The Laplanders and the Samoieds are indeed subjected to a sole tax in sables or marten-skins. The republic of San Marino pays nothing more than tithes for the maintenance of that state in its splendour.

There is, in Europe, a nation celebrated for its equity and its valour that pays no tax. This is Switzerland. But thus it has happened. The people have put themselves in the place of the dukes of Austria and Zahringen. The small cantons are democratical, and very poor. Each inhabitant pays but a trifling sum toward the support of this little republic. In the rich cantons the people are charged, for the state, with those duties which the archdukes of Austria and the lords of the land used to exact. The Protestant cantons are, in proportion, twice as rich as the Catholic, because the state, in the first, possesses the lands of the monks. Those who were formerly subjects to the archdukes of Austria, to the duke of Zahringen, and to the monks, are now the subjects of their own country. They pay to that country the same tithes, the same fines of alienation, that they paid to their former masters, and as the subjects, in general, have very little trade, their merchandise is liable to no charges, except some small staple duties. The men make a trade of their courage, in their dealings with foreign powers, and sell themselves for a certain term of years, which brings some money into their country at our expense; and this example is as singular a one in the civilized world as is the sole tax now laid on by our new legislators.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. So, sir, the Swiss are not plundered, jure divino, of one-half of their goods; and he that has four cows in Switzerland is not obliged to give two of them to the state?

THE GEOMETRICIAN Undoubtedly not. In one canton, upon thirteen tons of wine, they pay one and drink the other twelve. In another canton, they pay the twelfth, and drink the remaining eleven.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. Why am I not a Swiss? That cursed tax, that single and singularly iniquitous tax, that has reduced me to beggary! But then again, three or four hundred taxes, of which it is impossible for me to retain or pronounce the bare names, are they more just and more tolerable? Was there ever a legislator who, in founding a state, wished to create counsellors to the king, inspectors of coal-measurers, gaugers of wine, measurers of wood, searchers of hog-tongues, comptrollers of salt butter? or to maintain an army of rascals twice as numerous as that of Alexander, commanded by sixty generals, who lay the country under contribution, who gain every day signal victories, who take prisoners, and who sometimes sacrifice them in the air, or on a boarded stage, as the ancient Scythians did, according to what my vicar told me?

Now, was such a legislation, against which so many outcries were raised, and which caused the shedding of so many tears, much better than the newly imposed one, which at one stroke cleanly and quietly takes away half of my subsistence? I am afraid that on a fair liquidation it will be found that under the ancient system of the revenue they used to take, at times and in detail, three-quarters of it.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. Iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra. Est modus in rebus. Caveas ne quid nimis.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. I have learned a little of history, and something of geometry, but I do not understand a word of Latin.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. The sense is pretty nearly as follows: There is wrong on both sides. Keep to a medium in everything. Nothing too much.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. I say, nothing too much; that is really my situation; but the worst of it is, I have not enough.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. I allow that you must perish of want, and I, too, and the state, too, if the new administration should continue only two years longer; but it is to be hoped heaven will have mercy on us.

THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS. We pass our lives in hope, and die hoping to the last. Adieu, sir; you have enlightened me, but my heart is grieved.

THE GEOMETRICIAN. This is, indeed, often the fruit of knowledge.

Chapter IV.

An Adventure With A Carmelite.

When I had thanked the academician of the Academy of Sciences for having set me right, I went away quite out of heart, praising Providence, but muttering between my teeth these doleful words: “What! to have no more than forty crowns a year to live on, nor more than twenty-two years to live! Alas! may our life be yet shorter, since it is to be so miserable!”

As I was saying this, I found myself just opposite a very imposing house. Already was I feeling myself pressed by hunger. I had not so much as the hundred and twentieth part of the sum that by right belongs to each individual. But as soon as I was told that this was the palace of my reverend fathers, the bare-footed Carmelites, I conceived great hopes, and said to myself, “Since these saints are humble enough to go bare-footed, they will be charitable enough to give me a dinner.”

I rang. A Carmelite came to the door.

“What would you please to have, my son?”

“A morsel of bread, my reverend father. The new edicts have stripped me of everything.”

“Son, know that we ourselves beg charity; we do not bestow it.”

“What! while your holy institute forbids you to wear shoes, you have the house of a prince, and can you refuse to give me a meal!”

“My son, it is true, we go without stockings and shoes; that is an expense the less; we feel no more cold in our feet than in our hands. As to our fine house, we built it very easily, and we have a hundred thousand livres a year of income from houses in the same street.”

“So, then! you suffer me to die of hunger, while you have an income of a hundred thousand livres! I suppose you pay fifty thousand of these to the new government?”

“Heaven preserve us from paying a single farthing! It is only the produce of the land, cultivated by laborious hands, callous with work, and moistened with tears, that owes taxes to the legislative and executive power. The alms which have been bestowed upon us have enabled us to build those houses by the rent of which we get a hundred thousand livres a year. But these alms, coming from the fruits of the earth, and having, consequently, already paid the tax, ought not to pay twice. They have sanctified the faithful believers, who have impoverished themselves to enrich us, and we continue to beg charity, and to lay under contribution the Faubourg of St. Germain in order to sanctify a still greater number of the faithful believers.”

Having thus spoken, the Carmelite politely shut the door in my face.

I then passed along and stopped before the Hôtel of the Mousquetaires gris, and related to those gentlemen what had just happened to me. They gave me a good dinner and a half-crown (un écu). One of them proposed to go directly and set fire to the convent; but a musketeer, more discreet than he, remonstrated with him, insisting that the time for action had not yet arrived, and implored him to wait patiently a little longer.

Chapter V.

Audience Of The Comptroller-General.

I went, with my half-crown, to present a petition to the comptroller-general, who was that day giving audience.

His ante-chamber was filled with people of all kinds. There were there especially some with more bluff faces, more prominent bellies, and more arrogant looks than my man of eight millions. I durst not draw near to them; I saw them, but they did not observe me.

A monk, a great man for tithes, had begun a suit at law against certain subjects of the state, whom he called his tenants. He had already a larger income than the half of his parishioners put together, and was moreover lord of the manor. His claim was, that whereas his vassals had, with infinite pains, converted their heaths into vineyards, they owed him a tithe of the wine, which, taking into the account the price of labour, of the vine-props, of the casks and cellarage, would carry off above a quarter of the produce.

“But,” said he, “as the tithes are due, jure divino, I demand the quarter of the substance of my tenants, in the name of God.”

The minister of the revenue said to him, “I see how charitable you are.”

A farmer-general, extremely well-skilled in assessments, interposed, saying:

“Sir, that village can afford nothing to this monk, as I have, but the last year, made the parishioners pay thirty-two taxes on their wine, besides their over-consumption of the allowance for their own drinking. They are entirely ruined. I have seized and sold their cattle and movables, and yet they are still my debtors. I protest, then, against the claim of the reverend father.”

“You are in the right,” answered the minister of the revenue, “to be his rival; you both equally love your neighbour, and you both edify me.”

A third, a monk and lord of the manor, whose tenants were in mortmain, was waiting for a decree of the council that should put him in possession of all the estate of a Paris simpleton who, having inadvertently lived a year and a day in a house subject to this servitude and enclosed within the property of this priest, had died at the year’s-end. The monk was claiming all the estate of this person, and claiming it jure divino.

The minister found by this that the heart of this monk was as just and as tender as those of the others.

A fourth, who was comptroller of the royal domains, presented a specious memorial, in which he sought to justify his having reduced twenty families to beggary. They had inherited property from their uncles, their aunts, their brothers, or cousins, and were liable to pay the duties. The officers of the domain had generously proved to them that they had not set the full value on their inheritances that they were much richer than they believed, and, consequently, having condemned them to a triple fine, ruined them in charges, and threw the heads of the families into jail, he had bought their best possessions without untying his purse-strings.

The comptroller-general said to him, in a tone indeed rather bitter:

“Euge, controlleur bone et fidelis, quia supra pauca fuisti fidelis, fermier-general te constituam.” [4]

But to a master of the requests, who was standing at his side, he said in a low voice:

“We must make these blood-suckers, sacred and profane, disgorge. It is time to give some relief to the people, who, without our care, and our equity, would have nothing to live upon, in this world at least, however they might fare in the other.”

Some, of profound genius, presented projects to him. One of them had imagined a scheme to lay a tax on wit. “All the world,” said he, “will be eager to pay, as no one cares to pass for a fool.”

The minister declared to him, “I exempt you from the tax.”

Another proposed to lay the only tax upon songs and laughing, in consideration that we were the merriest nation under the sun, and that a song was a relief and comfort for everything. But the minister observed that of late there were hardly any songs of pleasantry made; and he was afraid that, to escape the tax, we would become too serious.

The next that presented himself was a trusty and loyal subject, who offered to raise for the king three times as much by making the nation pay three times less. The minister advised him to learn arithmetic.

A fourth proved to the king in the way of friendship, that he could not raise above seventy-five millions, but that he was going to procure him two hundred and twenty-five. “You will oblige me in this,” said the minister, “as soon as we shall have paid the public debts.”

At length, who should appear but a deputy of the new author, who makes the legislative power co-proprietor of all our lands, jure divino, and who was giving the king twelve hundred millions of revenue. I knew the man again who had flung me into prison for not having paid my twenty crowns, and throwing myself at the feet of the comptroller-general, I implored his justice; upon which he burst out a-laughing, and telling me it was a trick that had been played me, he ordered the doers of this mischief in jest to pay me a hundred crowns damages, and exempted me from the land-tax for the rest of my life. I said to him, “God bless your honour!”

Chapter VI.

The Man Of Forty Crowns Marries, Becomes A Father, And Descants Upon The Monks.

The Man of Forty Crowns having improved his understanding, and having accumulated a moderate fortune, married a very pretty girl, who had a hundred crowns a year of her own. As soon as his son was born, he felt himself a man of some consequence in the state. He was famous for making the best baskets in the world, and his wife was an excellent seamstress. She was born in the neighbourhood of a rich abbey of a hundred thousand livres a year. Her husband asked me one day why those gentlemen, who were so few in number, had swallowed so many of the forty-crown lots? “Are they more useful to their country than I am?” “No, dear neighbour.” “Do they, like me, contribute at least to the population of it?” “No.” “Do they cultivate the land? Do they defend the state when it is attacked?” “No, they pray to God for us.” “Well, then, I will pray to God for them in return.”

QUESTION. How many of these useful gentry, men and women, may the convents in this kingdom contain?

ANSWER. By the lists of the superintendents, taken toward the end of the last century, there were about ninety thousand.

QUESTION. According to our ancient account, they ought not, at forty crowns a head, to possess above ten million eight hundred thousand livres. Pray, how much have they actually?

ANSWER. They have to the amount of fifty millions, including the masses, and alms to the mendicant monks, who really lay a considerable tax on the people. A begging friar of a convent in Paris publicly bragged that his wallet was worth fourscore thousand livres a year.

QUESTION. Let us now consider how much the distribution of fifty millions among ninety thousand shaven crowns gives to each? Let us see, is it not five hundred and fifty-five livres?

ANSWER. Yes, and a considerable sum it is in a numerous society, where the expenses even diminish by the quantity of consumers; for ten persons may live together much cheaper than if each had his separate lodging and table.

QUESTION. So that the ex- Jesuits, to whom there is now assigned a pension of four hundred livres, are then really losers by the bargain.

ANSWER. I do not think so, for they are almost all of them retired among their friends, who assist them. Several of them say masses for money, which they did not do before; others get to be preceptors; some are maintained by female bigots; each has made a shift for himself; and, perhaps, at this time, there are few of them who have tasted of the world, and of liberty, that would resume their former chains. The monkish life, whatever they may say, is not at all to be envied. It is a maxim well known that the monks are a kind of people who assemble without knowing, live without loving, and die without regretting each other.

QUESTION. You think, then, that it would be doing them a great service to strip them of all their monks’ habits?

ANSWER. They would undoubtedly gain much by it, and the state still more. It would restore to the country a number of subjects, men and women, who have rashly sacrificed their liberty, at an age to which the laws do not allow a capacity of disposing of tenpence a year income. It would be taking these corpses out of their tombs, and afford a true resurrection. Their houses might become hospitals, or be turned into places for manufactures. Population would be increased. All the arts would be better cultivated. One might at least diminish the number of these voluntary victims by fixing the number of novices. The country would have subjects more useful, and less unhappy. Such is the opinion of all the magistrates, such the unanimous wish of the public, since its understanding is enlightened. The example of England and other states is an evident proof of the necessity of this reformation. What would England do at this time, if, instead of forty thousand seamen, it had forty thousand monks? The more they are multiplied, the greater need there is of a number of industrious subjects. There are undoubtedly buried in the cloisters many talents which are lost to the state. To make a kingdom flourish, there should be the fewest priests and the most artisans possible. So far ought the ignorance and barbarism of our forefathers to be from being any rule for us, that they ought rather to be an admonition to us to do what they would do if they were in our place, with our improvements in knowledge.

QUESTION. It is not then out of hatred to monks that you wish to abolish them, but out of love to your country? I think as you do. I would not have my son a monk. And if I thought I was to rear children for nothing better than a cloister, I would not wish to become a father.

ANSWER. Where, in fact, is that good father of a family that would not groan to see his son and daughter lost to society? This is seeking the safety of the soul. It may be so, but a soldier that seeks the safety of his body, when his duty is to fight, is punished. We are all soldiers of the state; we are in the pay of society; we become deserters when we quit it.

Why, then, has monkishness prevailed? Because, since the days of Constantine, the government has been everywhere absurd and detestable; because the Roman Empire came to have more monks than soldiers; because there were a hundred thousand of them in Egypt alone; because they were exempt from labour and taxes; because the chiefs of those barbarous nations which destroyed the empire, having turned Christians, in order to govern Christians, exercised the most horrid tyranny; because, to avoid the fury of these tyrants, people threw themselves in crowds into cloisters, and so, to escape one servitude, put themselves into another; because the popes, by instituting so many different orders of sacred drones, contrived to have so many subjects to themselves in other states; because a peasant likes rather to be called reverend father, and to give his benedictions, than to follow a plough’s tail; because he does not know that the plough is nobler than a monk’s habit; because he had rather live at the expense of fools than by a laborious occupation; in short, because he does not know that, in making a monk of himself, he is preparing for himself unhappy days, of which the sad groundwork will be nothing but a tedium vita and repentance.

QUESTION. I am satisfied. Let us have no monks, for the sake of their own happiness, as well as ours. But I am sorry to hear it said by the landlord of our village, who is father to four boys and three girls, that he does not know how to dispose of his daughters, unless he makes nuns of them.

ANSWER. This too often repeated plea is at once inhuman, detrimental to the country, and destructive to society. Every time that it can be said of any condition of life whatever, that if all the world were to embrace it mankind would perish, it is proved that that condition is a worthless one, and that whoever embraces it does all the mischief to mankind that in him lies.

Now, it being a clear consequence that if all the youth of both sexes were to shut themselves up in cloisters the world would perish, monkery is, if it were but in that light alone, the enemy to human nature, independently of the horrid evils it has formerly caused.

QUESTION. Might not as much be said of soldiers?

ANSWER. Certainly not, for if every subject carried arms in his turn, as formerly was the practice in all republics, and especially in that of Rome, the soldier is but the better farmer for it. The soldier, as a good subject ought to do, marries, and fights for his wife and children. Would it were the will of heaven that every labourer was a soldier and a married man! They would make excellent subjects. But a monk, merely in his quality of a monk, is good for nothing but to devour the substance of his countrymen. There is no truth more generally acknowledged.

QUESTION. But, sir, the daughters of poor gentlemen, who cannot portion them off in marriage, what are they to do?

ANSWER. Do! They should do, as has a thousand times been said, like the daughters in England, in Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, Holland, half Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Tartary, Turkey, Africa, and in almost all the rest of the globe. They will prove much better wives, much better mothers, when it shall have been the custom, as in Germany, to marry women without fortune. A woman, industrious and a good economist, will do more good in a house than a daughter of a farmer of the revenue, who spends more in superfluities than she will have brought of income to her husband.

There is a necessity for houses of retreat for old age, for infirmity, for deformity. But by the most detestable of all abuses, these foundations are for well-made persons. Let a humpbacked old woman present herself to enter into a cloister, and she will be rejected with contempt, unless she will give an immense portion to the house. But what do I say? Every nun must bring her dower with her; she is else the refuse of the convent. Never was there a more intolerable abuse.

QUESTION. Thank you, sir. I swear to you that no daughter of mine shall be a nun. They shall learn to spin, to sew, to make lace, to embroider, to render themselves useful. I look upon the vows of convents to be crimes against one’s country and one’s self. Now, sir, I beg you will explain to me, how comes it that a certain writer, in contradiction to human kind, pretends that monks are useful to the population of a state, because their buildings are kept in better repair than those of the nobility, and their lands better cultivated?

ANSWER. He has a mind to divert himself; he knows but too well that ten families, who have each five thousand livres a year in land, are a hundred, nay, a thousand times more useful than a convent that enjoys fifty thousand livres a year, and which has always a secret hoard. He cries up the fine houses built by the monks, and it is precisely those fine houses that provoke the rest of the subjects; it is the very cause of complaint to all Europe. The vow of poverty condemns those palaces, as the vow of humility protests against pride, and as the vow of extinguishing one’s race is in opposition to nature.

QUESTION. Bless me! Who can this be that advances so strange a proposition?

ANSWER. It is the friend of mankind [Monsieur le M. de Mirabeau, in his book called L’Ami des Homines. It is against this marquis that the jest on the only tax is levelled; a tax proposed by him]. or rather the friend of the monks.

QUESTION. I begin to think it advisable to be very distrustful of books.

ANSWER. The best way is to make use, with regard to them, of the same caution as with men. Choose the most reasonable, examine them, and never yield unless to evidence.

Chapter VII.

On Taxes Paid To A Foreign Power.

About a month ago the Man of Forty Crowns came to me, holding both his sides, which seemed ready to burst with laughing. In short, he laughed so heartily that I could not help laughing also, without knowing at what. So true it is, that man is born an imitative animal, that instinct rules us, and that the great emotions of the soul are catching. Ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adflent, Humani vultus.

When he had his laugh out, he told me that he had just come from meeting with a man who called himself the prothonotary of the Holy See, and that this personage was sending away a great sum of money to an Italian, three hundred leagues off, in the name and behalf of a Frenchman, on whom the king had bestowed a small fief or fee; because the said Frenchman could never enjoy this benefit of the king’s conferring, if he did not give to this Italian the first year’s income.

“The thing,” said I, “is very true; but it is not quite such a laughing matter either. It costs France about four hundred thousand livres a year, in petty duties of this kind, and in the course of two centuries and a half, that this custom has lasted, we have already sent to Italy fourscore millions.”

“Heavenly father!” he exclaimed, “how many forty crowns would that make? Some Italian, then, subdued us, I suppose, two centuries and a half ago, and laid that tribute upon us!”

“In good faith,” answered I, “he used to impose on us, in former times, in a much more burdensome way. That is but a trifle in comparison to what, for a long time, he levied on our poor nations of Europe.”

Then I related to him how those holy usurpations had taken place and came to be established. He knows a little of history, and does not want for sense. He easily conceived that we had been slaves, and that we were still dragging a little bit of our chain that we could not get rid of. He spoke much, and with energy, against this abuse; but with what respect for religion in general. With what reverence did he express himself for the bishops! How heartily did he wish them many forty crowns a year, that they might spend them in their dioceses in good works.

He also wished that all the country vicars might have a number of forty crowns, that they might live with decency.

“It is a sad thing,” said he, “that a vicar should be obliged to dispute with his flock for two or three sheaves of corn, and that he should not be amply paid by the country. These eternal contests for imaginary rights, for the tithes, destroy the respect that is owing to them. The unhappy cultivator who shall have already paid to the collectors his tenth penny, and the twopence a livre, and the tax, and the capitation, and the purchase of his exemption from lodging soldiers after he shall have lodged soldiers for this unfortunate man, I say, to see the vicar take away in addition the tithe of his produce, he can no longer look on him as his pastor, but as one that flays him alive that tears from him the little skin that is left him. He feels but too sensible, that while they are, jure divino, robbing him of his tenth sheaf, they have the diabolical cruelty not to give him credit for all that it will have cost him to make that sheaf grow. What then remains to him for himself and family? Tears, want, discouragement, despair, and thus he dies of fatigue and misery. If the vicar were paid by the country, he would be a comfort to his parishioners, instead of being looked on by them as their enemy.” The worthy man melted as he uttered these words; he loved his country, and the public good was his idol. He would sometimes emphatically say, “What a nation would the French be if it pleased!” We went to see his son, whom the mother, a very neat and clean woman, was nursing. “Alas!” said the father, “here thou art, poor child, and hast nothing to pretend to but twenty-three years of life, and forty crowns a year.”

Chapter VIII.

On Proportions.

The produce of the extremes is equal to the produce of the means; but two sacks of corn stolen are not, to those who stole them, as the loss of their lives is to the interest of the person from whom they were stolen.

The prior of —— from whom two of his domestic servants in the country had stolen two measures of corn, has just had the two delinquents hanged. This execution has cost him more than all his harvest has been worth to him; and since that time he has not been able to get a servant.

If the laws had ordained that such as stole their master’s corn should work in his grounds during their lives in fetters, and with a bell at their neck, fixed to a collar, the prior would have been a considerable gainer by it.

“Terror should be preventively employed against crimes”; very true, but work, on compulsion, and lasting shame, strike more terror than the gallows.

There was, some months ago at London, a malefactor who had been condemned to be transported to America to work there at the sugar works with the negroes. In England any criminal, as in many other countries, may get a petition presented to the king, either to obtain a free pardon or a mitigation of the sentence. This one presented a petition to be hanged, alleging that he mortally hated work, and that he had rather suffer strangling for a minute than to make sugar all his lifetime.

Others may think otherwise; every one to his taste. But it has been already said, and cannot be too often repeated, that a man hanged is good for nothing, and that punishments ought to be useful.

Some years ago, in Turkey, two young men were condemned to be empaled, for having (without taking off their caps), stood to see the procession of the Lama pass by. The Emperor of China, who is a man of very good sense, said, that for his part, he should have condemned them to walk bareheaded, in every public procession, for three months afterwards.

“Proportion punishments to crimes,” says the Marquis Beccaria; but those who made the laws were not geometricians.

I hate the laws of Draco, which punish equally crimes and faults, wickedness and folly. Let us especially in all litigations, in all dissensions, in all quarrels distinguish the aggressor from the party offended, the oppressor from the oppressed. An offensive war is the procedure of a tyrant; he who defends himself is in the character of a just man.

As I was absorbed in these reflections, the Man of Forty Crowns came to me all in tears. I asked, with emotion, if his son, who was by right to live twenty-three years, was dead?

“No,” said he, “the little one is very well, and so is my wife; but I was summoned to give evidence against a miller, who has been put to the torture, ordinary and extraordinary, and who has been found innocent. I saw him faint away under redoubled tortures. I heard the crash of his bones. His outcries and screams of agony are not yet out of my ears; they haunt me. I shed tears for pity, and shudder with horror.

His tears drew mine. I trembled, too, like him, for I have naturally an extreme sensibility.

My memory then represented to me the dreadful fate of the Calas family: A virtuous mother in irons her children in tears, and forced to fly her house given up to pillage a respectable father of a family broken with torture agonizing on a wheel, and expiring in the flames; a son loaded with chains, and dragged before the judges, one of whom said to him:

“We have just now broken your father on the wheel; we will break you alive, too.”

I remember the family of Sirven, whom one of my friends met with among the mountains covered with ice, as they were flying from the persecution of a judge as ignorant as he was unjust. This judge (he told me) had condemned an innocent family to death on a supposition, without the least shadow of proof, that the father and mother, assisted by two of their daughters, had cut the throat of the third, and drowned her besides, for going to mass. I saw in judgments of this kind at once an excess of stupidity, of injustice, and of barbarity.

The Man of Forty Crowns joined with me in pitying human nature. I had in my pocket the discourse of an attorney-general of Dauphiny, which turned upon very important matters. I read to him the following passages:

“Certainly those must have been truly great men, who, at first, dared to take upon themselves the office of governing their fellow creatures, and to set their shoulders to the burden of the public welfare; who, for the sake of the good they meant to do to men, exposed themselves to their ingratitude, and for the public repose renounced their own; who made themselves, as one may say, middle-men between their fellow creatures and Providence, to compose for them, by artifice, a happiness which Providence seems otherwise to have refused to them by any other means.

“What magistrate was ever so careless of his responsibilities and duties to humanity as to entertain such ideas? Could he, in the solitude of his closet, without shuddering with horror and pity, cast his eyes on those papers, the unfortunate monuments of guilt or of innocence? Should he not think he hears a plaintive voice and groans issue from those fatal writings, and press him to decide the destiny of a subject, of a husband, of a father, or of a whole family? What judge can be so unmerciful (if he is charged with but one single process) as to pass in cold blood before the door of a prison? Is it I (must he say to himself) who detain in that execrable place my fellow creature, perhaps my countryman, one of humankind, in short? Is it I that confine him every day› that shut those execrable doors upon him? Perhaps despair will have seized him. He sends up to heaven my name loaded with his curses, and doubtless calls to witness against me that great judge of the world who observes us and will judge us both.

“Here a dreadful sight presents itself on a sudden to my eyes: The judge, tired with interrogating by words, has recourse to interrogation by tortures. Impatient in his inquiries and researches, and perhaps irritated at their inutility, he has brought to him torches, chains, levers, and all those instruments invented for producing pain, An executioner comes to interpose in the functions of the magistracy, and terminates by violence a judicial interrogation.

“Gentle philosophy! thou who never seekest truth but with attention and patience, couldst thou expect, in an age that takes thy name, that such instruments would be employed to discover that truth?

“Can it be really true that our laws approve this inconceivable method, and that custom consecrates it?

“Their laws imitate their prejudices, their public punishments are as cruel as their private vengeance, and the acts of their reason are scarce less unmerciful than those of their passions. What can be the cause of this strange contrariety? It is because our prejudices are ancient, and our morality new; it is because we are as penetrated with our opinions as we are inattentive to our ideas; it is because our passion for pleasures hinders us from reflecting on our wants, and that we are more eager to live than to direct ourselves right; it is, in a word, because our morals are gentle without being good; it is because we are polite, and are not so much as humane.”

These fragments, which eloquence had dictated to humanity, filled the heart of my friend with a sweet consolation. He admired with tenderness.

“What!” said he, “are such masterpieces as these produced in a province? I had been told that Paris was all the world, or the only place in it.”

“It is” said I, “the only place for producing comic operas; but there are at this time, in the provinces, magistrates who think with the same virtue and express themselves with the same force. Formerly, the oracles of justice, like those of morality, were nothing but matter of mere ridicule. Dr. Balouard declaimed at the bar, and Harlequin in the pulpit. Philosophy has at length come, and has said, ‘Do not speak in public, unless to set forth new and useful truths, with the eloquence of sentiment and of reason.’ “

But, say the praters, if we have nothing new to say, what then? Why, hold your tongues, replies philosophy. All those vain discourses for parade, that contain nothing but phrases, are like the fire on the eve of St. John’s, kindled on that day of the year in which there is the least want of it to heat one’s self it causes no pleasure, and not so much as the ashes of it remain.

Let all France read good books. But notwithstanding all the progress of the human understanding, there are few that read, and among those who sometimes seek instruction, the reading for the most part is very ill chosen. My neighbours, men and women, pass their time, after dinner, at playing an English game, which I have much difficulty to pronounce, since they call it whist. Many good citizens, many thick heads, who take themselves for good heads, tell you, with an air of importance, that books are good for nothing. But, Messieurs, the critics, do not you know that you are governed only by books? Do not you know that the statutes, the military code, and the gospel are books on which you continually depend? Read; improve yourselves. It is reading alone that invigorates the understanding; conversation dissipates it; play contracts it.

Thus it was that the Man of Forty Crowns proceeded to form, as one may say, his head and his heart. He not only succeeded to the inheritance of his two fair cousins, but he came also to a fortune left by a very distant relation, who had been a sub-farmer of the military hospitals, where he had fattened himself on the strict abstinence to which he had put the wounded soldiers. This man never would marry. He never would own any of his relations. He lived in the height of debauchery, and died at Paris of a surfeit. He was, as any one may see, a very useful member of the state.

Our new philosopher was obliged to go to Paris to get possession of the inheritance of this relative. At first the farmers of the domain disputed it with him. He had the good luck, however, to gain his cause, and the generosity to give to the poor of his neighbourhood, who had not their contingent of forty crowns a year, a part of the spoils of the deceased son of fortune. After which he set himself about satisfying his passion for having a library.

He read every morning and made extracts. In the evening he consulted the learned to know in what language the serpent had talked to our good mother; whether the soul is in the callous body, or in the pineal gland; whether St. Peter lived five and twenty years at Rome; what specific difference there is between a throne and a dominion; and why the negroes have a flat nose. He proposed to himself, besides, never to govern the state, nor to write any pamphlets against new dramatic pieces. He was called Mr. Andrew, which was his Christian name. Those who have known him do justice to his modesty and to his qualities, both natural and acquired.

Chapter IX.

A Great Quarrel.

During the stay of Mr. Andrew at Paris there happened a very important quarrel. The point was to decide whether Marcus Antoninus was an honest man and whether he was in hell or in purgatory, or in limbo, waiting till the day of resurrection. All the men of sense took the part of Marcus Antoninus. They said: “Antoninus has been always just, temperate, chaste, and beneficent. It is true, he has not so good a place in paradise as St. Anthony, for proportions ought to be observed, as has been before recommended. But certainly the soul of Antoninus is not roasting on a spit in hell. If he is in purgatory, he ought to be delivered out of it; there need only be masses said for him. Let the Jesuits, who have no longer anything to do, say three thousand masses for the repose of the soul of Marcus Antoninus. Putting each mass at fifteen pence, they will get two thousand two hundred and fifty livres by it. Besides, some respect is owing to a crowned head. He should not be lightly damned.

The party opposed to these good people pretended, on the contrary, that no compounding for salvation ought to be allowed to Marcus Antoninus; that he was a heretic; that the Carpocratians and the Alogi were not so bad as he; that he had died without confession; that it was necessary to make an example; that it was right to damn him, if but to teach better manners to the emperors of China and Japan to those of Persia, Turkey, and Morocco to the kings of England, Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia to the stadtholder of Holland to the avoyers of the Canton at Berne, who no more go to confession than did the Emperor Marcus Antoninus; that, in short, there is an unspeakable pleasure in passing sentence against a dead sovereign, which one could not fulminate against him in his lifetime, for fear of losing one’s ears.

This quarrel became as furious as was formerly that of the Ursulines and the Annonciades… In short, it was feared that it would come to a schism, as in the time of the hundred and one Mother Goose’s tales, and of certain bills payable to the bearer in the other world. To be sure, a schism is something very terrible. The meaning of the word is a division in opinion, and till this fatal moment all men had been agreed to think the same thing.

Mr. Andrew, who was an excellent member of society, invited the chiefs of the two parties to sup with him. He is one of the best companions that we have. His humour is gentle and lively; his gayety is not noisy; he is open, frank, and easy. He has not that sort of wit which seems to aim at stifling that of others. The authority which he conciliates to himself is due to nothing but his graceful manner, to his moderation, and to a round, good-natured face, which is quite persuasive. He could have brought to sup cheerfully together a Corsican and a Genoese a representative of Geneva and a negative man the mufti and an archbishop. He managed so dextrously as to make the first stroke that the disputants of both parties aimed at each other fall to the ground, by turning off the discourse and by telling a very diverting tale, which pleased equally the damning and the damned. In short, when they had got a little good-humoured and elevated with wine, he made them sign an agreement that the soul of Marcus Antoninus should remain in statu quo that is to say, nobody knows where till the day of final judgment.

The souls of the doctors of divinity returned quietly to their limbos after supper, and all was calm. This adjustment of the quarrel did great honour to the Man of Forty Crowns; and, since then, whenever any very peevish virulent dispute arose among men of letters, or among men not of letters, the advice given was, “Gentlemen, go and sup at Master Andrew’s!”

Chapter X.

A Rascal Repulsed.

The reputation which Mr. Andrew had acquired for pacifying quarrels by giving good suppers drew upon him last week a singular visit. A dark-complexioned man, shabbily enough dressed, rather crook-backed, with his head leaning toward one shoulder, a haggard eye and dirty hands, asked to be invited to a supper with his enemies.

“Who are your enemies?” said Mr. Andrew, “and who are you?”

“Alas, sir,” said he, “I am forced to confess that I am taken for one of those wretches that compose libels to get bread, and who are forever crying out, ‘Religion! religion! religion!’ in order to come into some little benefice. I am accused of having calumniated some of the most truly religious subjects, the most sincere adorers of divinity, and the most honest men of the kingdom. It is true, sir, that in the heat of composition there often fall from the pen of those of my trade certain little inadvertencies or slips, which are taken for gross errors, and some liberties taken with the truth, which are termed impudent lies. Our zeal is looked upon in the light of a horrid mixture of villainy and fanaticism. It has been alleged that while we are ensnaring the easy faith of some silly old women, we are the scorn and execration of all the men of worth who can read.

“My enemies are the principal members of the most illustrious academies of Europe, writers much esteemed, and beneficent members of society. I have but just published a book under the title of Antiphilosophical. I had nothing but the best intentions, and yet no one would buy my book. Those to whom I made presents of it threw it into the fire, telling me it was not only anti-reasonable, but anti-Christian, and extremely anti-decent.”

“Well, then!” said Mr. Andrew to him, “follow the example of those to whom you presented your libel, throw it into the fire, and let no more be said of it. It is unnecessary to ask you to sup with men of wit, who can never be your enemies, since they will never read you.”

“Could not you, sir, at least,” said the hypocrite to him, “reconcile me with the relations of the deceased Monsieur de Montesquieu, to whose memory I offered an indignity, that I might give honour and glory to the reverend father Rout.

“Zounds!” said Mr. Andrew, “the reverend father Rout has been dead this long time; go and sup with him.”

Chapter XI.

The Good Sense Of Mr. Andrew.

But how greatly did the sense of Mr. Andrew improve in vigour from the time he procured a library! He lives with books as with men, and is careful in his choice of them. What a pleasure it is to gain instruction, to enlarge one’s mind by studying the best works of the greatest authors.

He congratulates himself on being born at a time when human reason is tending toward perfection. “How unhappy should I have been,” he used to say, “if the age I live in had been that in which they used to condemn to the galleys those who wrote against the categories of Aristotle.”

Distress had weakened the springs of Mr. Andrew’s soul; but good fortune restored their elasticity. There are many Andrews in the world to whom nothing is wanting but a turn of the wheel of fortune to make of them men of true merit.

He is now well acquainted with all the affairs of Europe, and especially with the progress of the human understanding.

He recently remarked to me that Reason travels by slow journeys from north to south, in company with her two intimate friends, Experience and Toleration. Agriculture and Commerce attend them. When Reason presented herself in Italy, the congregation of the Index sternly repulsed her. All she could do was to secretly send some of her agents, who, in spite of her enemies, do some good. Let but some years more pass, and it is to be hoped that the country of the Scipios will no longer be that of harlequins in monks’ habits.

She has sometimes met with cruel foes in France; but she has now so many friends in that kingdom that she stands a good chance of at length becoming first minister there.

When she presented herself in Bavaria and Austria, she found two or three great wig-blocks that stared at her with stupid and astonished eyes. Their greeting was: “Madam, we never heard of you; we do not know you.” Her answer to which was: “Gentlemen, in time you will come to know me and to love me. I have been well received at Berlin, at Moscow, at Copenhagen, at Stockholm. It is long ago that I have been naturalized by Act of Parliament in England, through the labours of Locke, Gordon, Trenchard, Lord Shaftesbury, and a number of others of the same nation. You will, some day or other, confer on me the like grant. I am the daughter of Time. I expect everything from my father.”

When she passed over the frontiers of Spain and Portugal, she blessed God on observing that the fires of the Inquisition were less frequently kindled. She rejoiced on seeing the Jesuits expelled; but was afraid that, while the country had been cleared of the foxes, it was still left exposed to the ravages of wolves.

If she makes any fresh attempts to gain entrance into Italy it is thought she will begin by establishing herself at Venice; and that she will take up her abode in the kingdom of Naples, in spite of the liquefaction of the saint’s blood in that country, which awakens in her mind mournful reflections on human credulity. It is pretended that she has an infallible secret for untying the strings of a crown, which are entangled, nobody knows how, in those of a mitre.

Chapter XII.

The Good Supper At Mr. Andrew’s.

We supped at Mr. Andrew’s yesterday, together with a Doctor Sorbonne, with Monsieur Pinto, the celebrated Jew, with the chaplain of the Protestant chapel of the Dutch ambassador, the secretary of the Prince Gallitsin of the Greek Church, a Calvinist Swiss captain, two philosophers, and three ladies of great wit.

The supper was a very long one; and yet, so polite it must be owned we are grown so much is one afraid at supper to give any cause of offence to one’s brethren, that there was no more disputing upon religion than as if not one of those at table had ever had any. It is not so with the Regent Cogé, and the ex-Jesuit Patouillet, and with all the animals of that kind. Those pitiful creatures will say more stupidly abusive things in one pamphlet of two pages than the best company in Paris can say agreeable and instructive ones in a supper of four hours. And what is stranger yet, they dare not tell a man to his face what they have the impudence to print.

The conversation turned at first on a piece of pleasantry in the Persian Letters, in which it is repeated, after a number of grave personages, that the world is not only growing worse, but that it is becoming depopulated, so that if the proverb should have any truth in it, that “the more fools there. are, the more laughter,” laughing is likely to be soon banished from the face of the earth.

The Doctor of Sorbonne assured us that, in fact, the world was almost reduced to nothing. He quoted the Father Petau, who demonstrates that in less than three hundred years the descendants of one of the sons of Noah (I forget whether it was Shem or Japheth), amounted to six hundred and twelve millions three hundred and fifty-eight thousand true believers within two hundred and eighty-five years after the universal deluge.

Mr. Andrew asked, why in the time of Philip le Bel, that is to say, about three hundred years after Hugh Capet, there were not six hundred and twenty-three thousand millions of princes of the royal family?

“It is,” said the Doctor of Sorbonne, “because the stock of faith has greatly decreased.”

A great deal was said about Thebes and its hundred gates, and of the million of soldiers that issued out of those gates with the twenty thousand chariots of war.

“Shut the book there,” said Mr. Andrew: “Since I have taken to reading I beg to suspect that the same genius that wrote Garagantua used of yore to write all the histories.”

“But, in short,” said one of the company, “Thebes, Memphis, Babylon, Nineveh, Troy, Seleucia were great cities once, and now no longer exist.”

“Granted,” answered the secretary of the Prince Gallitsin; “but Moscow, Constantinople, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lyons (which is better than ever Troy was), and all the towns of France, Germany, Spain, and the North were then deserts.”

The Swiss captain, a gentleman of great knowledge, owned to us that when his ancestors took it into their heads to quit their mountains and their precipices to go and take forcible possession, as was but reasonable, of a finer country, Caesar, who saw with his own eyes the list of those emigrants, found that their number amounted to three hundred and sixty-eight thousand, inclusive of the old, the children, and the women. At this time the single canton of Berne possesses as many inhabitants, which is not quite the half of Switzerland, and I can assure you that the thirteen cantons have above seven hundred and twenty thousand souls, including the natives who are serving or carrying on business in other countries. From such data gentlemen of learning make absurd calculations and they base fallacious systems on no better footing.

The question next agitated was whether the citizens of Rome, in the time of the Caesars, were richer than the citizens of Paris in the time of Monsieur Silhouette?

“Oh,” says Mr. Andrew, “this is a point on which I have some call to speak. I was a long time the Man of Forty Crowns, but I conceive that the citizens of Rome had more. Those illustrious robbers on the highway pillaged the finest countries of Asia, of Africa, and of Europe. They lived splendidly on the produce of their rapines; but yet there were doubtless some beggars at Rome. I am persuaded that among those conquerors of the world there were some reduced to an income of forty crowns a year, as I formerly was.”

“Do you know,” said a learned member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres, “that it cost Lucullus, for every supper he gave in the saloon of Apollo, thirty-nine thousand three hundred and twelve livres of our money; but that the celebrated epicurean Atticus did not expend above two hundred and thirty livres a month for his table.”

“If that be true,” said I, “he deserved to be president of the Miser-society, lately established in Italy. I have read, as you have done, in Florus, that incredible anecdote; but, perhaps Florus had never supped with Atticus, or else his text, like so many others, has been corrupted by copyists. No Florus shall ever make me believe that the friend of Caesar and of Pompey, of Cicero and of Antony, all of whom were often entertained at his house, got off for something less than ten louis d’or a month. But thus exactly ‘tis that history is written.”

Madam Andrew, for her part, told the learned member of the Academy that if he would keep her table for ten times as much, she would be greatly obliged to him.

I am persuaded that this evening at Mr. Andrew’s cost him as much as the monthly expense of Atticus. As for the ladies, they expressed a doubt whether the suppers of Rome were more agreeable than those of Paris. The conversation was very gay though leaning a little to the learned. There was no talk of new fashions nor of the ridiculous part of any one’s character or conduct, nor of the scandalous history of the day.

The question upon luxury was discussed and searched to the bottom. It was mooted whether or not luxury had been the ruin of the Roman Empire; and it was proved that the two empires of the east and west owed their destruction to nothing but to religious controversies and to the monks; and, in fact, when Alaric took Rome, its whole attention was engrossed by theological disputes; when Mahomet took Constantinople the monks defended much better the eternity of the light of Mount Tabor, which they saw on their navel, than they defended the town against the Turks.

One of our men of learning made a very significant remark. It was that those two great empires were annihilated, but that the works of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid still exist.

From the age of Augustus they made but one skip to the age of Louis XIV. A lady put the question why it was that with a great deal of wit there was no longer produced scarcely any work of genius?

Mr. Andrew answered that it was because such works had been produced in the last age. This idea was finely spun, and yet solidly true. It bore a thorough handling. After that they fell with some harshness upon a Scotchman, who had taken it into his head to give rules to taste, and to criticise the most admirable passages of Racine, without understanding French. But there was one Denina still more severely treated. He had abused Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws without comprehending him, and had especially censured what is the most liked and approved in that work.

This recalled to my mind Boileau’s making a parade of his affected contempt of Tasso. One of the company advanced that Tasso, with all his faults, was as superior to Homer as Montesquieu, with his still greater imperfections, was above the farrago of Grotius. But there was presently a strong opposition made to these false criticisms, dictated by national hatred and prejudice. The Seignior Denina was treated as he deserved, and as pedants ought to be by men of wit.

It was especially remarked, with much sagacity, that the greatest part of the literary works of this age, as well as of the conversations, turned on the examination of the masterpieces of the last century, in which we are like disinherited children, who are taking an estimate of their father’s estate. It was confessed that philosophy had made great progress, but that the language and style was somewhat corrupted.

It is the nature of all these conversations to make transitions from one subject to another. All these objects of curiosity, of science, and of taste, soon vanished, to give way to the great scene which the Empress of Russia and the King of Poland were giving to the world. They had been just raising up and restoring the rights of oppressed humanity, and establishing liberty of conscience in a part of the globe of a much greater extent than the old Roman Empire. This service done to human kind, this example given to so many courts, was mentioned with the applause it deserved. Healths were drunk to the philosophical empress, to the royal philosopher, and to the philosophical primate, with the wish of their having many imitators. Even the doctors of Sorbonne admired them, for there are some persons of good sense in that body, as there were formerly some men of wit among the Boeotians.

The Russian secretary astonished us with a recital of the great establishments they were forming in Russia. It was asked why people were, in general, more fond of reading the history of Charles XII, who passed his life in destroying, than that of Peter the Great, who consumed his in creating? On this we concluded that weakness and a frivolous turn of mind are the causes of this preference; that Charles XII was the Don Quixote, and Peter, the Solon of the North; that superficial understandings prefer a wild, extravagant heroism to the great views of a legislator; that the particulars of the foundation of a town are less pleasing to them than the rashness of a man who, at the head of only his domestics, braves an army of ten thousand Turks; and that, in short, most readers love amusement better than instruction. Thence it is that a hundred women read The Thousand and One Arabian Nights for one that reads two chapters of Locke.

What was not talked of at this supper of which I shall long retain the remembrance? It was also in course to say a word of the actors and actresses, that eternal subject of the table-talk of Versailles and of Paris. It was agreed that a good declaimer was as rare as a good poet. For my part, I must own that Plato’s banquet could not have given me more pleasure than that of Monsieur and Madame Andrew.

Our very pretty gentlemen and our very fine ladies would, doubtless, have found it dull, and been tired with it. They pretend to be the only good company; but neither Mr. Andrew nor I ever willingly sup with that kind of good company.

Notes

[1] In 1737 Bishop Warburton published his famous work, The Divine Legation of Moses, in which he asserted, “that the doctrine of a future state of reward and punishment was omitted in the books of Moses,” and then proceeded to demonstrate “from that very omission, that a system which could dispense with a doctrine, the very bond and cement of human society, must have come from God, and that the people to whom it was given must have been placed under His immediate superintendence.” In other words, the divine origin of the Mosaic “system” is demonstrated, because Moses did not teach to the chosen people the doctrine of a future life beyond the grave. (Voltaire’s note.)

[2] The doctrine of metempsychosis must be relied upon to explain this seeming anachronism.—E. (Voltaire’s note.)

[3] Jure Divino: ‘by Divine Right.’ (Transcriber’s note.)

[4] ‘Well done, thou good and faithful controller; because you have been faithful in very little, I make you a farmer-general’—a parody of the parable of the talents: see Mathew, 19, v.17. A farmer-general was a tax-collector. (Transcriber’s note.)

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