CHAPTER VII.

_Being cast out from that Country, of the new_ _Adventures which Befell him; and of the_ Demon _of_ Socrates.

At length I resolved to march forwards, till Fortune should afford me the company of some Beasts, or at least the means of Dying. She favourably granted my desire; for within half a quarter of a League, I met two huge Animals, one of which stopt before me, and the other fled swiftly to its Den; for so I thought at least; because that some time after, I perceived it come back again in company of above Seven or Eight hundred of the same kind, who beset me. When I could discern them at a near distance, I perceived that they were proportioned and shaped like us. This adventure brought into my mind the old Wives Tales of my Nurse concerning _Syrenes, Faunes_ and _Satyrs_: Ever now and then they raised such furious Shouts, occasioned undoubtedly by their Admiration[1] at the sight of me, that I thought I was e'en turned a Monster. At length one of these Beast-like men, catching hold of me by the Neck, just as Wolves do when they carry away Sheep, tossed me upon his back and brought me into their Town; where I was more amazed than before, when I knew they were Men, that I could meet with none of them but who marched upon all four.

When these People saw that I was so little, (for most of them are Twelve Cubits long,) and that I walked only upon Two Legs, they could not believe me to be a Man: For they were of opinion, that Nature having given to men as well as Beasts Two Legs and Two Arms, they should both make use of them alike. And, indeed, reflecting upon that since, that scituation of Body did not seem to me altogether extravagant; when I called to mind, that whilst Children are still under the nurture of Nature, they go upon all four, and that they rise not on their two Legs but by the care of their Nurses; who set them in little running Chairs, and fasten straps to them, to hinder them from falling on all four, as the only posture that the shape of our Body naturally inclines to rest in.

They said then, (as I had it interpreted to me since) That I was infallibly the Female of the Queens little Animal. And therefore as such, or somewhat else, I was carried streight to the Town-House, where I observed by the muttering and gestures both of the People and Magistrates, that they were consulting what sort of a thing I could be. When they had conferred together a long while, a certain Burgher, who had the keeping of the strange Beasts, besought the Mayor and Aldermen to commit me to his Custody, till the Queen should send for me to couple me to my Male. This was granted without any difficulty, and that Juggler carried me to his House; where he taught me to Tumble, Vault, make Mouths, and shew a Hundred odd Tricks, for which in the Afternoons he received Money at the door from those that came in to see me.

But Heaven pitying my Sorrows, and vext to see the Temple of its Maker profaned, so ordered it, that one day [when] I was tied to a Rope, wherewith the Mountebank made me Leap and Skip to divert the People, I heard a Man's voice, who asked me what I was, in Greek. I was much surprised to hear one speak in that Country as they do in our World. He put some Questions to me, which I answered, and then gave him a full account of my whole design, and the success of my Travels: He took the pains to comfort me, and, as I take it, said to me: "Well, Son, at length you suffer for the frailties of your World: There is a Mobile[2] here, as well as there, that can sway with nothing but what they are accustomed to: But know, that you are but justly served; for had any one of this Earth had the boldness to mount up to yours, and call himself a Man, your Sages would have destroyed him as a Monster."

[Sidenote: The Demon of Socrates]

He then told me, That he would acquaint the Court with my disaster; adding, that so soon as he had heard the news that went of me, he came to see me, and was satisfied that I was a man of the World of which I said I was; because he had Travelled there formerly, and sojourned in _Greece_, where he was called the _Demon of Socrates_: That after the Death of that Philosopher, he had governed and taught _Epaminondas_ at _Thebes_: After which being gone over to the _Romans_, Justice had obliged him to espouse the party of the Younger _Cato_: That after his Death, he had addicted himself to Brutus: That all these great Men having left in that World no more but the shadow of their Virtues, he with his Companions had retreated to Temples and Solitudes. "In a word," added he, "the People of your World became so dull and stupid, that my Companions and I lost all the Pleasure that formerly we had had in instructing them: Not but that you have heard Men talk of us; for they called us _Oracles, Nymphs, Geniuses, Fairies, Houshold-Gods, Lemmes_,[3] _Larves_[4] _Lamiers_,[5] _Hobgoblins, Nayades, Incubusses, Shades, Manes, Visions_ and _Apparitions_: We abandoned your World, in the Reign of _Augustus_, not long after I had appeared to _Drusus_ the Son of _Livia_, who waged War in _Germany_, whom I forbid to proceed any farther. It is not long since I came from thence a second time; within these Hundred Years I had a Commission to Travel thither: I roamed a great deal in _Europe_, and conversed with some, whom possibly you may have known. One Day, amongst others, I appeared to _Cardan_,[6] as he was at his Study; I taught him a great many things, and he in acknowledgment promised me to inform Posterity of whom he had those Wonders, which he intended to leave in writing.[7] There I saw _Agrippa_[8] the Abbot _Trithemius_[9] Doctor _Faustus_, _La Brosse_, _Cæsar_,[10] and a certain Cabal of Young Men, who are commonly called _Rosacrucians_[11] or _Knights of the Red Cross_, whom I taught a great many Knacks and Secrets of Nature, which without doubt have made them pass for great Magicians: I knew _Campanella_[12] also; it was I that advised him, whilst he was in the Inquisition at _Rome_, to put his Face and Body into the usual Postures of those whose inside he needed to know, that by the same frame of Body he might excite in himself the thoughts which the same scituation had raised in his Adversaries; because by so doing, he might better manage their Soul, when he came to know it; and at my desire he began a Book, which we Entituled, _De Sensu Rerum_.[13]

"I likewise haunted, in _France, La Mothe le Vayer_[14] and _Gassendus_;[15] this last hath written as much like a Philosopher, as the other lived: I have known a great many more there, whom your Age call _Divines_[16] but all that I could find in them was a great deal of Babble and a great deal of Pride. In fine, since I past over from your Country into _England_, to acquaint my self with the manners of its Inhabitants, I met with a Man, the shame of his Country; for certainly it is a great shame for the Grandees of your States to know the virtue which in him has its Throne, and not to adore him: That I may give you an Abridgement of his Panegyrick, he is all Wit, all Heart, and possesses all the Qualities, of which one alone was heretofore sufficient to make an Heroe: It was _Tristan_ the Hermite.[17] The Truth is, I must tell you, when I perceived so exalted a Virtue I mistrusted it would not be taken notice of, and therefore I endeavoured to make him accept Three Vials, the first filled with the Oyl of Talk,[18] the other with the Powder of Projection,[19] and the third with _Aurum Potabile_;[20] but he refused them with a more generous Disdain than _Diogenes_ did the Complements of _Alexander_. In fine, I can add nothing to the Elogy[21] of that Great Man, but that he is the only Poet, the only Philosopher, and the only Freeman amongst you: These are the considerable Persons that I conversed with; all the rest, at least that I know, are so far below Man that I have seen Beasts somewhat above them.

"After all, I am not a Native neither of this Country nor yours, I was born in the Sun; but because sometimes our World is overstock'd with people, by reason of the long Lives of the Inhabitants, and that there is hardly any Wars or Diseases amongst them: Our Magistrates, from time to time, send Colonies into the neighbouring Worlds. For my own part, I was commanded to go to yours; being declared Chief of the Colony that accompanyed me. I came since into this World, for the Reasons I told you; and that which makes me continue here, is, because the Men are great lovers of Truth; and have no Pedants among them; that the Philosophers are never perswaded but by Reason, and that the Authority of a Doctor, or of a great number, is not preferred before the Opinion of a Thresher in a Barn, when he has right on his side. In short, none are reckoned Madmen in this Country, but Sophisters and Orators." I asked him how they lived? he made answer, three or four thousand Years; and thus went on:

"Though the Inhabitants of the Sun be not so numerous as those of this World; yet the Sun is many times over stocked, because the People being of a hot constitution are stirring and ambitious, and digest much."

"You ought not to be surprised at what I tell you; for though our Globe be very vast, and yours little, though we die not before the end of Four thousand Years, and you at the end of Fifty; yet know, that as there are not so many Stones as clods of Earth, nor so many Animals as Plants, nor so many Men as Beasts; just so there ought not to be so many Spirits as Men, by reason of the difficulties that occur in the Generation of a perfect Creature."

I asked him, if they were Bodies as we are? He made answer, That they were Bodies, but not like us, nor any thing else which we judged such; because we call nothing a Body commonly, but what we can touch: That, in short, there was nothing in Nature but what was material; and that though they themselves were so, yet they were forced, when they had a mind to appear to us, to take Bodies proportionated to what our Senses are able to know; and that, without doubt, that was the reason why many have taken the Stories that are told of them for the Delusions of a weak Fancy, because they only appeared in the night time: He told me withal, That seeing they were necessitated to piece together the Bodies they were to make use of, in great haste, many times they had not leisure enough to render them the Objects of more Senses than one at a time, sometimes of the Hearing, as the Voices of _Oracles_, sometimes of the Sight, as the _Fires_ and _Visions_, sometimes of the Feeling, as the _Incubusses_; and that these Bodies being but Air condensed in such or such a manner, the Light dispersed them by its heat, in the same manner as it scatters a Mist.

So many fine things as he told me, gave me the curiosity to question him about his Birth and Death; if in the Country of the Sun, the _individual_ was procreated by the ways of Generation, and if it died by the dissolution of its Constitution, or the discomposure of its Organs? "Your senses," replied he, "bear but too little proportion to the Explication of these Mysteries: Ye Gentlemen imagine, that whatsoever you cannot comprehend is spiritual, or that it is not at all; but that Consequence[22] is absurd, and it is an argument, that there are a Million of things, perhaps, in the Universe, that would require a Million of different Organs in you to understand them. For instance, I by my Senses know the cause of the Sympathy that is betwixt the Load-stone and the Pole, of the ebbing and flowing of the Sea, and what becomes of the Animal after Death; you cannot reach these high Conceptions but by Faith, because they are Secrets above the power of your Intellects; no more than a Blind-man can judge of the beauties of a Land-skip, the Colours of a Picture, or the streaks of a Rainbow; or at best he will fancy them to be somewhat palpable, to be like Eating, a Sound, or a pleasant Smell: Even so, should I attempt to explain to you what I perceive by the Senses which you want, you would represent it to your self as somewhat that may be Heard, Seen, Felt, Smelt or Tasted, and yet it is no such thing."

He was gone on so far in his Discourse, when my Juggler perceived, that the Company began to be weary of my Gibberish, that they understood not, and which they took to be an inarticulated Grunting: He therefore fell to pulling my Rope afresh to make me leap and skip, till the Spectators having had their Belly-fulls of Laughing, affirmed that I had almost as much Wit as the Beasts of their Country, and so broke up.

[1] Astonishment.

[2] Mobile = people, populace. _Cf_. p. 145. (Search: start p. 145: "... there he entertained me till Suppertime...")

[3] Lemures; malicious spirits of the dead. _Cf_. Milton:

"The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint."

[4] Lars, larvas; ghosts, spectres.

[5] Lamias; female demons or vampires.

[6] _Cf_. p. 12 (Search: start p. 12: "... Accident, Providence, Fortune, or what...")

[7] "Jerome Cardan pretended to have written most of his books under the dictation of a Familiar Spirit ... but, in his treatise _De Rerum Varietate_, he ingenuously declares that he had never had any other genius but his own: _Ego certe nullum dæmonem aut genium mihi adesse cognosce_" (Note of Paul Lacroix.)

[8] Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, 1486-1535, philosopher, astrologer, and alchemist. Cyrano introduces him in his _Lettre XII_., "Pour les Sorciers."

[9] Jean Trithème (or Johann Tritheim), Abbot of Spanheim; a man of universal scholarship, and an experimenter in alchemy; also accused of sorcery.

[10] César de Nostradamus, physician and astrologer of the early sixteenth century.

[11] A famous occult order which probably never existed, but about which much was written in the first half of the seventeenth century. It was supposed to have been founded early in the fifteenth century by Rosenkrenz, a pilgrim who had acquired all the wisdom of the Orient.

[12] Tomaso Campanella, 1568-1639, Italian poet and philosopher, who came to Paris in 1634. His philosophy was much admired by Cyrano, since he rejected the Aristotelism of the schools, advocated empiricism as the only method of arriving at truth, and insisted on the "four Elements" as the origin of all things.

He appears as an important character in Cyrano's _Voyage to the Sun_, where he is Cyrano's companion and guide to the Land of the Philosophers.

[13] Campanella's principal work, published in 1620.

[14] François de La Mothe le Vayer, 1588-1672. He was the tutor of the Due d'Orléans, brother of Louis XIV., and, after 1654, of Louis XIV. himself. In philosophy he was a free-thinker, in literature a disciple of Montaigne. He nevertheless concealed his scepticism in philosophy, even in his chief work, the _Doutes sceptiques_, under a pretended orthodoxy in religion, and so was never persecuted. Possibly it is to this that Cyrano refers in saying, that he "_lived_ as much like a philosopher, as Gassendi wrote."

[15] _Cf_. p 28, n. 1. (See note 5 chap. III)

[16] _Divine_. The translator has mistaken an adjective for a noun.

[17] François Tristan Thermite, 1601-1655, a French dramatist of importance. His tragedy of _Mariamne_, in date contemporary with Corneille's _Cid_, marks him as a predecessor of Racine in method and manner. He is also the author of fugitive verse, but neither that nor his plays make him quite worthy of Cyrano's exalted "Elogy."

He was compelled to pass the years 1614-1620 in England, on account of a duel fought at the age of thirteen!

[18] Talc, silicate of magnesia.

[19] The "Philosopher's Stone," in form of powder, for chemical "projection" upon baser metals, to transmute them into gold.

[20] The "Elixir of Life," or the "Philosopher's Stone" in liquid form.

[21] _Eulogy_. Still so used at the end of the eighteenth century.

[22] Consequence = _conclusion_, deduction. Cf. Matthew Prior:

"Can syllogisms set things right? No, majors soon with minors fight. Or both in friendly consort joined The consequence limps false behind."