Part 6

John was an overseer of highway and bridge construction. He loved his cousin Mary, who contributed by her needlework to the slender family earnings. The young people had been betrothed six months, when one fine day, without any known reason, the Baroness declared that Rose was the one for John, and John exactly suited to Rose. Great commotion. The fear of being disinherited kept every one concerned in subjection to the "dearly beloved Aunt." Mary, desperately weeping, was preached into promising to enter a convent, the Baroness paying her dowry; this for the dear sake of John, whose name she might unite in her prayers with that of the Providential Aunt, who mercifully opened the way of salvation to her. John, alas, was more easily persuaded than she, when he learned that he and Rose together would be chief heirs; and Rose, who had ideas of grandeur, and dreamt of nothing less than going on to the stage, lent herself with her whole heart to the comedy of love fatly remunerative. John was invited to give up his work and "live like a gentleman," and Rose's natural tendencies coöperating, the young couple, loaded down with gifts of sounding specie, spread themselves gloriously, under the happy eyes of the Baroness, in every description of silly extravagance.

The Baron died of an attack of gout, a disease unknown to clodhoppers. His wealth passed to his wife. Rose and John had received on their marriage an income of only 10,000 francs, but they had the formal promise of the entire inheritance. Unfortunately, a week before her death, the Baroness was shocked by "a lack of regard" on Rose's part, which consisted in not having evinced a sufficiently vociferous despair at the recital of her Aunt's sufferings! By a will made in her last moments everything was bequeathed to the Church, in payment for numberless ceremonies whereby the utmost of celestial bliss was to be secured for the dying woman.

Rose and John, after a torrent of invectives, left that part of the country. An income of 10,000 francs signified poverty for them. They fled to Paris, where in less than a year John lost down to his last penny in speculations. After that they went their respective ways, Rose to sing in a café-concert of the Faubourg St. Martin, John to take employment with a booking agency for the races. He has as yet only been sentenced to one month's imprisonment for a swindling card-game.

Admirable results of an Evil Beneficence!

IX

A MAD THINKER

Among the wise, some will perhaps agree with me, the maddest madmen are not those who are commonly called so. In great walled and barred and guarded buildings--prisons where people who are condemned by "science," just as elsewhere people are condemned by "law," expiate the crime of a psychological disorder greater than that of the majority--unfortunate beings are kept behind bolts and triple locks, for the incoherence of their syllogisms, while fellow mortals no more mentally stable are allowed to do their raving out on the world's stage.

For one whole year in my youth I dwelt among the lunatics of Bicêtre. I had many interviews with "impulsives," whom a sudden disturbance of the organism had made dangerously violent, and who talked pathetically about their "illness," believing it cured, whereas it was not. I held discussions with patients suffering from more or less specific delusions. From those now long-past associations I have retained a habit of comparing the mentalities inside asylums with those outside, which proceeding leads rather to the proposal than the solution of problems.

What seems clear, however, is that we have not discovered a standard of good sense, a way of measuring reason, by which we could definitely separate sane from morbid psychology; that, furthermore, such a method, had we discovered it, would not help us much, considering the disconcerting ease with which men pass from the normal to the pathological state, and vice versa. We should need too many asylums, and there would be too continual a coming and going in and out of them. We should not have time, between sojourns there, to study what we wanted to learn, to teach what we knew, to prove to each other that we are all afloat in a sea of errors, to quarrel, to vote, to kill one another, and to reproduce ourselves for the sake of perpetuating the balance of unbalance amid which fate has placed us.

Let us then accept the human phenomenon as it stands, and beware of classifications which might lead us to believe that the mere fact of being at liberty on the public highways is a guarantee of sound mind. Whoever doubts this may wisely consider the judgments men are pleased to pass upon one another. Question the Christian with regard to the atheist, he will tell you that one must be totally devoid of common sense to deny evidence that to him seems conclusive. The Mahomedan will not conceal from you, if you discuss Christianity with him, that one must unmistakably be mad, to identify three in one, and believe in a physical manifestation of God to man. The Buddhist will look upon the Mussulman as feeble in reasoning power, and the practiser of fetishism on the coast of Africa or of Australasia will declare all these sects foolish, since to him the only rational thing is to worship his fetishes, which are, strangely enough, matched in our religion by the many miraculous statues. Lastly, let me mention the philosophers, who agree in regarding all those people as affected with morbid degeneration, while pitying one another because of the mutual imputation of diseased understanding.

At the time when I, like so many others, was seeking for the absolute truth which should give me the key to all knowledge, I made the acquaintance of one of those same seekers, possibly mad, or possibly gifted with more than ordinary intelligence, who applied all his mental energy to the solution of the problem of the construction of the world, and to answering the questions raised by the presence of man on earth. He was one of those "unfrocked priests" whom people usually blame because they refuse to preach what seems to them a lie. I do not give his name, his express desire having been to pass unknown among men. He left the priesthood quietly, and after a fairly long stay in Paris, during which he studied medicine, returned to his native village, where two small farms brought an income more than sufficient for his needs.

He lived alone, despised by pious relatives, who besieged him with flattering attentions aimed at his inheritance, but were kept at a respectful distance by his witty and well-directed shafts of sarcasm. A veritable Doctor Faustus. Fifty years he spent in assiduous study of the great minds that make up the history of human thought. His door was open to the poor, but he did not seek them out, absorbed as he was in problems allowing him neither diversion nor respite. He had no curiosity as to what was going on in the world. His spirit lived in the perpetual tension of reaching out toward the unknown, feverishly importuned to deliver up its mystery, and he did not wish to know anything of men, their conflicts, their often contradictory efforts to better their fate. Had he lived in the midst of the Siberian steppes, or on some Malay Island, he would not have been more entirely cut off from the surrounding social life. The Franco-Prussian war and the Commune were as remote from him in the depths of the Vendée as Alexander's expedition to the Indies. When one of the farmers once tried to recall that period to his mind: "Yes, yes, I remember," he answered, "all the fruit was frozen that year." It was the only vestige in his memory of those terrific storms.

He was naturally considered mad, but it could not be denied that he reasoned pertinently on all subjects. Absorbed in books, he had for sole company the men of all time, and felt himself far better acquainted with Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Newton, Laplace, Darwin, and Auguste Comte than with Bismarck or General Trochu. Shut up day and night in a great room to which no one had admittance, he lived over with delight the vast poem of the creation of the world. In waking to consciousness, the universe, he was wont to say, had set us a riddle, after the manner of the Sphinx, and he, a new Oedipus, was challenging the monster. He would tear out its secret, he would proclaim it from the earth to the stars, while disdaining the glory dear to ordinary mortals. For he had taken every precaution to ensure the author's name remaining absolutely unknown when his great work should be published. In order to avert suspicion, the book was first to be printed in a foreign tongue.

If the Abbé was mad--the peasants still called him by his ecclesiastical title, either from old habit, or respect for his mysterious investigations--his madness was certainly not a mania for self-aggrandizement. Disinterested truth, truth with no other reward than success in the effort to reach it, was the single impulse moving this monkishly cloistered existence. One might say that there was proof of an unbalanced mind. I will not argue the point. Absolute truth is undoubtedly beyond our reach. It is none the less true that the sustained effort to attain truth remains the noblest distinction of man. If it is reasonable to desire to know, who shall say at what point it becomes folly, through aspiration outstripping the possibility of satisfaction? Since, furthermore, this possibility increases with the progressive evolution of the mind, might not it follow that one who had been thought mad, in olden days, would be called wise to-day and that the madman of to-day will in future ages be a prodigy of luminous intellect? Find the boundary line between reason and unreason in this inextricable tangle!

But to return to our excellent "Abbé," with whom, by a curious chance, I became intimately acquainted, a few months before his death, I must say that he never troubled himself with these considerations, to him inane. He did not deny that there were maladies of the mind, but he professed complete scorn for the "collection of low prejudices" to which the name of "reason" was given by the general public. "I have come too soon," he said to me. "In a few thousand years they will erect statues to the man who will be a repetition of me. So far, men have parted at the cross-roads where the paths of science and faith diverge. Some day there will be one broad highroad to knowledge. The time has not come to lay that road. As barbarism covered over the premature flowering of Greek thought, so our present savagery would soon crowd out truths too newly arrived at, which only very gradually will take root in men's minds."

"Tell me," I said to him one day, "since you stand on such a height that you are free from the pride of the precursor, that you are insensible to human glory, that you do not even intend to leave to posterity your name as a seeker, have you never, alone with your conscience, and stripped of all personal interest, asked yourself whether you were sure, after all, entirely sure, of possessing this total and absolute truth?"

The Abbé's little gray eyes twinkled. He answered with a melancholy smile: "The final and irreparable failure of my religious faith was a fearful blow to me. I no longer believed. What had appeared to me good evidence on the day before looked to me from that day onward like the irrational wanderings of delirium. But I realize to-day, after so many years of meditation, that although my old conceptions of existence could not stand the test of experience, yet the framework of my mind has remained the same. I had abandoned the Theological Absolute; I was in search of a Scientific Absolute, no more to be found than the other. I do not regret my error, for I owe to it the greatest joys of my life. For thirty years the marvel of seeing the veil of Isis slowly raised, and the world, bit by bit, taken to pieces and put together again, according to infallible laws, brought me the supreme delight of grasping the world by thought. When I had exhausted analysis and synthesis, I undertook to tell my discoveries, and such was my mastery of my subject that in ten years I wrote a volume of five hundred pages, in which, I can say it now, for I have burned it, was contained what, in incalculable centuries to come, will be considered the treasure of human knowledge."

"You burned this work of yours?"

"Yes, to replace it by another."

"And is this other one final?"

"You want my complete confession? I am so near death that I will afford you this pleasure. Having finished my book, I decided to devote the rest of my life to going over it, pen in hand, and annotating it. Alas! When I became my own critic I found the fine frenzy of creation replaced by a power of keenly reasoning destructiveness which I had up to that time not suspected in myself. The creators of systems in the past were only gifted with the power of induction and prophecy. I had the power to dissect, to undermine my own inductions and prophecies. What we term truth is but an elimination of errors. I thought, I still think, that I had attained truth, pure and simple, but the edifice so laboriously built could not escape the pitiless criticism of the builder. The same mental gymnastics which had led to my replacing former doubts by demonstrated affirmations now raised fresh doubts in the face of my new demonstrations. What would have been their effect upon the unprepared intelligences for which the result of my labour was intended? I spent five years of painful spiritual tension in rewriting and condensing my work."

"And this time you were satisfied?"

"No more than before. While I am writing, I am, in spite of myself, possessed by the absolute. I take too vaulting a leap toward truth. Then I realize that men will shrug their shoulders and call me mad, and I question whether it is not in fact madness to try to bring to intelligences of to-day knowledge which belongs to the far future. Furthermore, no matter how strongly I have felt myself fortified on all sides by evidence, a fury of criticism has hurled me to the attack of my fortress of truth. It took two years to reduce my five-hundred-page book to two hundred pages. Four more years of work--and a notebook of perhaps fifty pages is all that is left--the bone and marrow of the whole matter, for my aim has been to eliminate, one by one, every element of possible uncertainty."

"And now there remains no doubt, I suppose?"

"Nay, doubt remains. Is it strength or weakness of mind? I cannot say. If I have time to go on working, nothing will be left of my work, and I shall have made the great journey, from reason that seeks to folly that finds, and from folly that knows to reason which, very wisely, still doubts."

The Abbé died six months later, leaving all he had to the poor. Besides his will, not a single page of writing was found among his belongings.

The village priest came to see him in his last hour. He spoke to him of God--bade him believe, alleging that science led to doubt--whereas faith----

"Then you yourself are sure, are you?" asked the dying man.

"Certainly--I know with absolute certainty."

"Reverend sir, I once spoke as you are speaking. Only ignorance is capable of such proud utterances. Grant to a dying man the privilege of delivering this lesson. I who have aspired to know, know that you know no more than I--even less--I dare affirm it. It is really not enough to justify taking up so much room in the sunshine!"

X

BETTER THAN STEALING

The man from Paris is a natural object of hatred to the poacher. I refer to the hunting man from Paris, who raises game for his own sport in carefully preserved enclosures. This ostentatious personage, who comes and fills the countryside with special guards to keep the aggrieved pedestrian out of glades and plains and bypaths, seems to the rustics a pernicious intruder, in a state of legal warfare against the countryman, who feels himself the friend and legitimate owner of the animals, furry or feathered, with whom his labour in the fields has made him well acquainted. All is fair play against this "maker of trouble." The only thing is not to get "pinched."

Then begins a warfare of ambushes and ruses with the band of gamekeepers, who, having the law on their side, always end by getting the better of those whose only argument of defence is the "natural right" of a man to destroy wild life.

During the season there are almost daily exchanges of shot. Often a man is killed, which means jail, penitentiary, scaffold. All for a miserable rabbit! Remnants of the feudalism of birth which the effort of revolutions has merely replaced by the feudalism of money.

The worst of it is that gamekeepers and poachers, mutually exasperated, cling to their quarrel, and that a taste for brigandage develops in men diverted from the unremunerative tilling of the soil by the daily temptation of booty. Deal as harshly as you may with the poacher, you will not succeed in discouraging him. Has anything ever cured a devotee of roulette? And to the excitement of gambling, in this case, is added the attraction of danger. There is no cure for it. The question of increasing the penalty for poaching often comes up. There will be long discussion before anything is ever done. The discrepancy would be too great between the misdeed and the punishment. And the matter of elections enters into it. No one is anxious to make too violent enemies among the citizen electors.

Entirely different is the question of poaching in the happy regions--there are not many left in France--where preserved hunting is still at the rhetorical stage. There the poacher is merely a hunter without a permit, and as no such thing exists as a peasant whom a hare has never tempted to use his gun, and as a natural understanding unites all those who are compelled to pay taxes against the State which represents taxation and statute labour, never will you find a field labourer ready to admit that a shot, in order to be lawful, needs the seal of a tax gatherer.

The poacher on free territory, therefore, does not hide as does the poacher on preserved lands. He plays a sort of tag with the rural guard, who is by no means eager to meet him, and with the occasional _gendarmes_, whose cocked hats and baldricks make them conspicuous from afar. Following along hedges, looking for burrows, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the ground, he scents out the wild creatures and knows the art of capturing them.

How often, in the days of my youth, have I accompanied the redoubtable Janière on his Sunday expeditions, when he would ostensibly leave the village by the highroad, his hands in his pockets, then dash into the fields, and miraculously find his gun hidden in a bush, a few feet from a rabbit hole. Nor man nor beast was ever known to get the better of him. He was an old Chouan of 1815 who, having been a poacher all his days, and a marauder now and then, died without ever having had a writ served on him. The entire district took pride in Janière. When he left us for a better world: "He never once went to prison," said the peasants by way of funeral oration. What that man could deduce from a blade of grass lying over on one side or the other at the edge of a thicket really approached the miraculous. He would consult the wind, the sun, and would construct for me the train of reasoning which must have brought the hare to the precise spot where we invariably found him. His accommodating gun made no more noise than the cracking of a whip. The victim, hidden in the hollow of a pollard, would at nightfall find its way under Janière's blouse.

But whither have I let myself wander? It was of the water poacher that I meant to speak. He, one might say, is the enemy of no man on earth. Fish, of dubious morals we are assured, find no such personal sympathy among us as do the furry and feathered folk. A carp, gasping on the grass, does not bring tears to our eyes, he seems to belong to a different world, and the police officer at war against illicit fishing, backed up by more or less convincing arguments relating to the restocking of rivers, has no one on his side. For this reason, my compatriot Simon Grelu counted as many friends as there were inhabitants in the canton. The killing of a hare in his lair rouses enmity among the poachers who alike had their eye on him. No quarrel results from a tench landed. Simon Grelu, besides fishing at once for profit and the love of it, gave freely of his catch, whence came the universal good-will accompanying him on his nightly or daily expeditions.

Our river in the Vendée, the Lay, wends its leisurely way amid reeds and waterlilies, sometimes narrowing between rocks covered with broom and furze and oak trees, sometimes widening under overarching alders, onward to the meadows, where it attracts the flocks. Everywhere are mills with their gates. It is a populous river, and no one could be said to "populate" it more than Simon Grelu, nominally a miller's assistant, living in the ruin of what was thought to have been a mill at the time of the wars between the Blues and the Whites.

Simon Grelu is a great tall fellow, all legs and arms and joints, with a long neck leading up to a long nose, which gives him the look of a heron. From the Marshland to the Woodland there is no more noted spoiler of rivers; he is celebrated for the constancy of his relations with the police. Hampered by his lengthy appendages, he is perpetually letting himself be caught, and disdaining what will be thought of it. Every angle of every rock, every stump by the water's edge, is so familiar and homelike to him that he cannot bear to leave his river, and rather than make good his escape on land, prefers to have a warrant served on him, secure in the fact that he has nothing wherewith to pay a fine.

When the police sergeant rebukes his men for their laziness, they cry with one accord:

"Let us go and look up Grelu!"

They go, and find him without the least trouble.

That was what happened last week, and owing to it I had the pleasure of witnessing the interview I am about to relate. I was taking a walk with the Mayor, when Simon Grelu suddenly stood before us. More elongated than ever, with his bony, sallow face, his pointed skull topped by a little tuft of white hair, his mouth open in a smile truly formidable from the threat of a single great black tooth which the slightest cough would inevitably have flung in one's face, the heron-man stood before us, motionless in his wooden shoes.

"I have come for my certificate, _monsieur le maire_," said he with a sort of clucking which might express either mirth or despair.

"What certificate?"

"Why, my certificate of mendicancy, as usual, when I am caught."

"What! Again? Is there no end to it?"

"It is better than stealing, isn't it, _monsieur le maire_?"

"But you have not the choice between poaching and stealing only, Simon. You could work."

"And do you suppose I don't work? Many thanks! Who drudges more than I do? The whole night in the water! Those accursed policemen played a trick on me!"

"They caught you?"

"That's nothing. They made a fool of me, _monsieur le maire_. No, it can't be called anything else. I shall never forgive myself for being made a fool of----"

"What happened?"

"What happened is that those policemen laughed at me all the way up and down the river. They were half a mile away, and I could still hear them roaring with laughter. No, I never knew I was such a dunderhead."

"But, come to the point, what did they do to you?"

"Ah--the villains! Imagine, _monsieur le maire_, it was just before daylight, and I was quietly fishing below the mill of La Rochette. The idea, anyway, of forbidding fishing before sunrise! Is it my fault if fishes come out to play at night?"

"Well--what happened?"

"I was in my boat----"

"You have a boat, then?"