Chapter 12

As for those who punctually make their appearance at the fatal tryst, they belong to the tribe of the unlucky. They are the unfortunate race of our race. When the rest all fly, they alone remain in their places. When others retreat, they advance boldly. They infallibly travel by the train that shall leave the rails, they pass underneath the tower at the exact moment of its collapse, they enter the house in which the fire is smouldering, cross the forest on which lightning shall fall, entrust all they have to the banker who means to abscond. They love the one woman on earth whom they should have avoided, they make the gesture they should not have made, they do the thing they should not have done. But when fortune beckons and the others are hastening, urged by the deep voice of benevolent powers, these pass by, not hearing; and, vouchsafed no advice or warning but that of their intellect, the very wise old guide whose purblind eyes see only the tiny paths at the foot of the mountain, they go astray in a world that human reason has not yet understood. These men have surely the right to exclaim against destiny; and yet not on the grounds that they would prefer. They have the right to ask why it has withheld from them the watchful guard who warns their brethren. But, this reproach once made--and it is the cardinal reproach against irreducible injustice--they have no further cause of complaint. The universe is not hostile to them. Calamities do not pursue them; it is they who go towards calamity Things from without wish them no ill; the mischief comes from themselves. The misfortune they meet has not been lying in wait for them; they selected it for their own. With them, as with all men, events are posted along the course of their years, like goods in a bazaar that stand ready for the customer who shall buy them. No one deceives them; they merely deceive themselves. They are in no wise persecuted; but their unconscious soul fails to perform its duty. Is it less adroit than the others: is it less eager? Does it slumber hopelessly in the depths of its secular prison: and can no amount of will-power arouse it from its fatal lethargy, and force the redoubtable doors that lead from the life that unconsciously is aware of all things to the intelligent life that knows nothing?

13

A friend in whose presence I was discussing these matters said to me yesterday: "Life, whose questions are more searching than those of the philosophers, will this very day compel me to add a somewhat curious problem to those you have stated. I am wondering what the result will be when two 'lucks'--in other words, two unconsciousnesses, of which one is adroit and fortunate, the other inept and bungling--meet and in some measure blend in the same venture, the same undertaking? Which will triumph over the other? I soon shall know. This afternoon I propose to take a step that will be of supreme importance to the person I value above all others in this world. Her entire future may almost be said to depend upon it, her exterior happiness, the possibility of her living in accordance with her nature and her rights. Now to me chance has always been a faithful and far-seeing friend; and as I glance over my past, and review the five or six decisive moments which, as with all men, were the golden pivots on which fortune turned, I am induced to believe in my star, and am morally certain that if I alone were concerned in the step I am taking to-day, it would be bound to succeed, because I am 'lucky.' But the person on whose behalf I am acting has never been fortunate. Her intellect is remarkably subtle and profound, her will is a thousand times stronger and better balanced than my own; but, with all this, one can only believe that she possesses a foolish or malignant unconsciousness, which has persistently, ruthlessly, exposed her to act after act of injustice, dishonesty, and treachery, has robbed her again and again of her due, and compelled her to travel the path of disastrous coincidence. Be sure that it would have forced her to embark on the ship that you speak of. I ask myself, therefore, what attitude will my vigilant, thoughtful unconsciousness adopt towards this indolent and sinning brother, in whose name it will have to act, whose place, as it were, it will take?

"How, and where, is the momentous decision being at this moment arrived at, in search of which I shall so soon set forth? What power is it that now, at this very moment, while I am speaking, is balancing the pros and cons, and decreeing the happiness or sorrow of the woman I represent? From which sphere, or perhaps immemorial virtue, from what hidden spirit or invisible star, will the weight fall that shall incline the scale to light or to darkness? To judge by outward appearance, decision must rest with the will, the reason, the interest of the parties engaged; in reality it often is otherwise. When one finds oneself thus face to face with the problem which directly affects a person we love, this problem no longer appears quite so simple; our eyes open wider, and we throw a startled, anxious, in a sense almost a virgin glance, upon all this unknown that leads us and that we are compelled to obey.

"I take this step therefore with more emotion, I put forth more zeal and vigour, than if it were my own life, my own happiness, that stood in peril. She for whom I am acting is indeed 'more I than I am myself,' and for a long time past her happiness has been the source of mine. Of this both my heart and my reason are fully aware; but does my unconsciousness know? My reason and heart, that form my consciousness, are barely thirty years old; my unconscious soul, still reminiscent of primitive secrets, may well date centuries back. Its evolution is very deliberate. It is as slow as a world that turns in time without end. It will probably therefore not yet have learned that a second existence has linked itself to mine, and completely absorbs it. How many years must elapse before the great news shall penetrate to its retreat? Here again we note its diversity, its inequality. In one man, perhaps, unconsciousness will immediately recognise what is taking place in his heart; in another, it will very tardily lend itself to the phenomena of reason. There is a love, again, such as that of the mother for her child, in which it moves in advance of both heart and reason. Only after a very long time does the unconscious soul of a mother separate itself from that of her children; it watches over these at first with far more zeal and solicitude than over the mother. But, in a love like mine, who shall say whether my unconsciousness has gathered that this love is more essential to me than my life? I myself believe that it is satisfied that the step I propose to take in no way concerns me. It will not appear; it will not intervene. At the very moment when I shall be feverishly displaying all the energy I possess, when I shall be striving for victory more keenly than were my salvation at stake, it will be tending its own mysterious affairs deep down in its shadowy dwelling. Were I seeking justice for myself, it would already be on the alert. It would know, perhaps, that I had better do nothing to-day. I should probably have not the slightest idea of intervention; but it would raise some unforeseen obstacle. I should fall ill; catch a bad cold, be prevented by some secondary event from arriving at the unpropitious hour. Then, when I was actually in the presence of the man who held my destiny in his hands, my vigilant friend would spread its wings over me, its breath would inspire me, its light would dispel my darkness. It would dictate to me the words that I must say: they would be the only words that could meet the secret objections of the master of my Fate. It would regulate my attitude, my silence, my gestures; it would endow me with the confidence, the nameless influence, which often will govern the decisions of men far more than the reasons of reason or the eloquence of interest. But here I am sorely afraid that my unconsciousness will do none of these things. It will remain perfectly passive. It will not appear on the familiar threshold. In its obtuseness, impervious to the fact that my life has ceased to be self-contained, it will act in accordance with its ancient traditions, those that have ruled it these hundreds of years; it will persist in regarding this matter as one that does not concern me, and will believe that in helping my failure it will be doing me service; whereas in truth it will afflict me more grievously, cause me more sorrow, than if it were to betray me at the approach of death. I shall be importing, therefore, into this affair, only the palest reflection, a kind of phantom, of my own luck; and I ask myself with dread whether this will suffice to counterbalance the contrary fortune which I have, as it were, assumed, and which I represent."

14

Some days later my friend informed me that his action had been unsuccessful. It may be that this reverse was only due to chance or to his own want of confidence. For the confidence that sees success ahead pursues it with a pertinacity and resource of which hesitation and doubt are incapable; nor is it troubled by any of those involuntary weaknesses which give so great an advantage to the adversary's instinct. And there may probably be much truth also in his manner of depicting unconsciousness. For truly, there are depths in us at which unconsciousness and confidence would seem to blend, and it becomes difficult to say where the first begins, or the second leaves off.

We will not pursue this too subtle inquiry, but rather consider the other and more direct questions that life is ever putting to us concerning one of its greatest problems--chance. This possesses what may be called a daily interest. It asks us, for instance, what attitude we should adopt towards men who are incontestably unlucky; men whose evil star has such pernicious power that it infallibly brings disaster to whatever comes within the range--often a very wide one--of its baleful influence. Ought we unhesitatingly to fly from such men, as Dr. Foissac advises? Yes, doubtless, if their misfortunes arise from an imprudent and unduly hazardous spirit, a heedless, quarrelsome, mischief-making, Utopian or clouded mind. Ill-luck is a contagious disease; and one unconsciousness will often infect another. But if the misfortunes be wholly unmerited, or fall upon those who are dear to us, flight were unjust and shameful. In such a case the conscious side of our being--which, though it know but little, is yet able to fashion truths of a different order, truths that might almost be the first flowers of a dawning world--is bound to resist the universal wisdom of unconsciousness, bound to brave its warnings and involve it in its own ruin, which may well be a victory upon an ideal plane that one day perhaps shall appeal to the unconsciousness also.

15

We ask ourselves, therefore, whether unconsciousness, which we regard as the source of our luck, is really incapable of change or improvement. Have we not all of us noticed how strange are the ways of chance? When we behold it active in a small town, or among a certain number of men within the range of our own observation, the goddess would seem to become as persistent as a gadfly, and no less fantastic. Her very marked personality and character will vary in accordance with the event or being whereon she may fasten. She has all kinds of eccentricities, but pursues each one logically to the finish. Her first gesture will tell us nothing; from her second we can predict all that she means to do. Protean divinity that no image could completely describe, here she leaps suddenly forth, like a fountain in the midst of a desert, to disappear after having given birth to an ephemeral oasis; there she returns at regular intervals, collecting and scattering, like migratory birds that obey the rhythm of the seasons. On our right she fells a man and concerns herself with him no further; on our left she bears down another, and furiously worries her victim. But, though she bring favour or ruin, she will almost always remain astoundingly faithful to the character she has once and for all assumed in a particular case. This man, for instance, who has been unsuccessful in war, will continue to be unsuccessful; that other will invariably win or lose at cards; a third will infallibly be deceived; a fourth will find water, fire, or the dangers of the street especially hostile; a fifth will be constantly fortunate or unfortunate in love, money matters, &c., and so to the end. All this may prove nothing, but we may regard it at least as some indication that her realm is truly within us and not without; and that a hidden force that emanates only from us provides her with form and with vestment.

Her habits at times will suddenly alter, one eccentricity producing another; some brusque change of front will give the lie to her character, to confirm it the instant after in a new atmosphere. We say then that "luck turns." May it not rather be our unconsciousness that is gradually developing, at last displaying some prudence, attention, and slowly becoming aware that important events are stirring in the world to which it is attached? Has it gained some experience? Has a ray of intelligence, a spark of will-power, filtered through to its lair and hinted at danger? Does it learn, after years have flown, and trial after trial has had to be borne, the wisdom of casting aside its confident apathy? Can external disaster arouse it from perilous slumber? Or, if it always has known what was happening over the roof of its prison, is it able, after long and painful effort, at last, at the critical moment, to contrive some sort of crevice in the great wall, built by the indifference of centuries, that separates it from its unknown sisters; and does it thus succeed in entering the ephemeral life on which a part of its own life depends?

16

And yet we must admit that this hypothesis of unconsciousness will not suffice to account for all the injustice of chance. Its three most iniquitous acts are the three disasters--the most terrible of all to which man is exposed--that habitually strike him before birth: I refer to absolute poverty, disease (especially in the shocking forms of physiological degradation and incurable infirmities, of repulsive ugliness and deformity), and intellectual weakness. These are the three great priestesses of unrighteousness that lie in wait for innocence and brand it, on the threshold of life. And yet, mysterious as their method of choice may appear, the triple source whence they derive these three irremediable scourges is less mysterious than one is inclined to believe. We need not look for it in a pre-established will, in fatal, hostile, eternal, impenetrable laws. Poverty has its origin in man's own province; and though we may marvel why one should be rich and the other poor, we are well aware that the existence, side by side, of excessive wealth and excessive misery, is due to human injustice alone. In this wickedness neither gods nor stars have part. And as for disease and mental weakness, when we shall have eliminated from them what now is due to poverty, mother of most of our moral and physical sorrows, as well as to the anterior, and by no means inevitable, faults of the parents, then, though some measure of persistent and unaccountable injustice may still remain, this relic of mystery will very nigh go into the hollow of the philosopher's hand, and there he shall, later, examine it at his leisure. But we of today shall be wise in refusing to allow our life to be unnecessarily darkened, or hedged round with imaginary maledictions and foes.

As far as ordinary luck is concerned, we shall do well to believe, for the moment, that the history of our fortune (which is not necessarily the history of our real happiness, since this may be wholly independent of luck) is the history of our unconscious being. There are more elements of probability in such a creed than in the assumption that the stars, eternity, or the spirit of the universe are taking part in our petty adventures; and it gives more spur to our courage. And this idea--even though it may possibly be as difficult to alter the character of our unconsciousness as to modify the course of Mars or of Venus--still seems less distant and less chimerical than the other; and when we have to choose between two probabilities, it is our imperative duty to select the one that presents the least obstacles to our hopes. Further, should misfortune be indeed inevitable, there would be I know not what proud consolation in being able to tell ourselves that it issues solely from us, and that we are not the victims of a malign will or the playthings of useless chance that in suffering more than our brothers we are perhaps only recording, in time and space, the necessary form of our own personality. And so long as calamity do not attack the intimate pride of man, he retains the force to continue the struggle and accomplish his essential mission: which is, to live with all the ardour whereof he is capable, and as though his life were of greater consequence than any other to the destinies of mankind.

This idea is also more conformable to the vast law which restores to us, one by one, the gods wherewith we had filled the world. Of these gods the greater number were merely the effects of causes that reposed in ourselves. As we progress we shall discover that many a force that mastered us and aroused our wonder was only an ill-understood fragment of our own power; and this will probably become more apparent every day.

And though we shall not have conquered the unknown force by bringing it nearer or enclosing it within us, there yet shall be gain in knowing where it abides and where we may question it. Obscure forces surround us; but the one that concerns us most nearly lies at the very centre of our being. All the others pass through it: it is their trysting-place: they re-enter and congregate there; and only in the degree of their relation to it have they interest for us.

To distinguish this force from the host of others we have called it unconsciousness. And when we shall have succeeded in studying this unconsciousness more closely, when its mysterious adroitness, its antipathies and preference, its helplessness, shall be better known to us, we shall have most strangely blunted the teeth and nails of the monster who persecutes us under the name of Fortune, Destiny or Chance. At the present hour we are feeding it still as a blind man might feed the lion that at last shall devour him. Soon perhaps the lion will be seen by us in its true light, and we shall then learn how to subdue him.

Let us therefore unweariedly follow each path that leads from our consciousness to our unconsciousness. We shall thus succeed in hewing some kind of track through the great and as yet impassable roads that lead from the seen to the unseen, from man to God, from the individual to the universe. At the end of these roads lies hidden the general secret of life. In the meanwhile let us adopt the hypothesis that offers the most encouragement to our existence in this life; in this life which has need of us for the solution of its own enigmas, seeing that in us its secrets crystallise the most limpidly and most rapidly.

THE END

[1] His history is concisely summed up by Dr. Foissac as follows:--"On the eighth Floréal of the year IV. the courier and postillion who were taking the mail from Paris to Lyons were attacked and murdered, at nine in the evening, in the forest of Senart. The assassins were Couriol, who had taken a seat in the cabriolet by the side of the courier; Durochal, Rossi, Vidal, and Dubosq, who had come to meet him on hired horses; and lastly Bernard, who had procured the horses, and took part in the subsequent distribution of plunder. For this crime, in which five assassins and one accomplice shared, _seven_ individuals, within the space of four years, mounted the steps of the guillotine. Justice, therefore, killed one man too many: her sword fell upon one who was innocent; nor could he have been one of these six individuals, all of whom confessed their crime. The innocent man was Lesurques, who had never ceased to declare that he was not guilty; and all his alleged accomplices disavowed any knowledge of him. How then came this unfortunate creature to be implicated in an affair that was to confer so sad an immortality upon his name? Fatality so contrived that, four days before the crime, Lesurques, who had left Douai with an income of eighteen thousand livres, and had come to Paris that he might give a better education to his children, happened to be lunching with a fellow-townsman named Guesno when Couriol came in and was invited to join them. Suspicion having at once fallen upon Couriol, the fact of this lunch was sufficient to cause Guesno to be put under arrest for a moment; but as he was able to prove an alibi, the judge, Daubenton, immediately set him at liberty. Only, as it was late, Daubenton told him to come the following day to fetch his papers.

"In the morning of the eleventh Floréal, Guesno, on his way for this purpose to the Prefecture of Police, met Lesurques, whom he invited to accompany him; an invitation which Lesurques, who had nothing special to do, accepted. While they were waiting in the antechamber for the magistrate to arrive, two women were shown in who had been asked to attend in connection with the affair; and they, deceived by Lesurques' resemblance to Dubosq, who had fled, unhesitatingly denounced him as one of the assassins, and unfortunately persisted in this statement to the end. The antecedents of Lesurques pleaded in his favour; and among other facts that he cited to prove that he had not left Paris during the day of the eighth Floréal, he declared that he had been present at certain dealings that had taken place at a jeweller's named Legrand, between this last and another jeweller named Aldenoff. These transactions had actually taken place on the eighth; but Legrand, on being requisitioned to produce his books, found that he had by a clerical blunder inscribed them under the date of the ninth. He thought the best thing he could do would be to scratch out the nine and convert it into an eight. He did this with the idea that he would thereby save his fellow-townsman Lesurques, whom he knew to be innocent, whereas he actually succeeded in ruining him. The alteration and substitution were easily detected; from that moment the prosecution and the jury declined to place the least confidence in the eighty witnesses for the defence called by the accused; he was convicted and his property confiscated. Eighty-seven days elapsed between his condemnation and execution, a delay that was altogether unusual at that period; but grave doubts had arisen as to his guilt.

"The Directorate did not possess the right of reprieve; they felt it their duty to refer the case to the Council of Five Hundred, asking 'whether Lesurques was to die because of his resemblance to a criminal?' The Council passed to the Order of the Day on the report of Simeon; and Lesurques was executed, forgiving his judges. And not only had he constantly protested his innocence, but at the moment the verdict was given Couriol had cried out, in firm tones, 'Lesurques is innocent!' He repeated this statement both on the fatal hurdle and on the scaffold. All the other prisoners, while admitting their own guilt, also declared the innocence of Lesurques. It was only in the year IX. that Dubosq, his double, was arrested and sentenced.