Part 7

He would have told me more but they came to fetch us for supper. My conductor led me into a magnificently furnished room but I saw nothing prepared to eat. Such a lack of meat when I was perishing of hunger forced me to ask him where the table was laid. I did not hear what he replied, for three or four young boys, the host's children, came up to me at that instant and with great civility undressed me to the shirt. This new ceremonial vastly astonished me, but I dared not ask its reason of my handsome attendants; and when my guide asked how I should like to begin I know not how I was able to reply with these two words: "A soup". Immediately I smelt the odour of the most succulent simmering that ever hit the nose of a rich sinner. I tried to get up from my place to track down with my nose the source of this agreeable vapour, but my guide prevented me: "Where are you going?" said he, "we will take a walk soon, but this is the time to eat; finish your soup and then we will have something else."

"But where the devil is the soup?" cried I in a rage. "Have you made a wager to banter me all day?"

"I thought", he replied, "that you had seen at the town whence we came either your master or someone else taking his meals; that is why I did not tell you of their methods of eating in this country. But since you are still ignorant of it, let me tell you that here they live on nothing but vapour. The art of cookery here is to enclose in large, specially moulded vessels the fumes which rise from meats and, having collected several kinds and several tastes, according to the appetite of those they entertain, they open the vessel which holds this odour and then another and then another until the company is quite satisfied. Unless you have already lived in this manner you will never believe that the nose unassisted by the teeth and throat can perform the office of the mouth in feeding a man; but I will make you see it by experience."

He had scarcely finished his promise when I smelled successively as they entered the room so many agreeable and nourishing vapours that I felt myself completely satisfied in less than a half-quarter of an hour. When we had risen he said: "This should not cause you a great deal of surprise, since you cannot have lived so long without having noticed that in your world cooks and pastry-cooks, who eat less than people of other occupations, are nevertheless fatter than they are. Whence is their fatness derived, unless it be from the smell of the food that perpetually surrounds them, penetrates their bodies and nourishes them? People in this world enjoy a more vigorous and less interrupted health, because their food causes hardly any excrements, which are the origin of almost all diseases. You were surprised perhaps when they undressed you before the meal, because the custom is never employed in your country, but here it is, and it is done in order that the animal may imbibe the vapour more easily."

"Sir", said I, "what you say appears very probable and I myself have just experienced something of it, but I must confess I cannot de-brutalise myself so promptly, and I should be very glad to have a solid morsel under my teeth."

He promised it, but only for the next day, because he said that to eat so soon after a meal would give me indigestion. We continued talking some time and then went up to our room to go to bed.

At the top of the staircase we were met by a man who gazed very attentively upon us and then conducted me to a cabinet whose floor was covered with orange flowers to the depth of three feet; and took my demon into another filled with carnations and jasmine. Seeing that I appeared amazed at this magnificence he told me this was the method of making beds in that country. At last we each lay down in our chamber and as soon as I was stretched out on my flowers I perceived by the light of thirty large glow-worms enclosed in a crystal (for they use no other candle) the three or four young boys who had undressed me at supper, one of whom began to tickle my feet, another my thighs, another my flanks, another my arms, so delicately and nicely that in less than a moment I fell asleep.

Next morning my demon entered with the sun. "I have kept my word", said he, "you shall break your fast more substantially than you supped last night." At these words I got up and he led me by the hand to a place behind the inn garden where one of the host's children awaited us with a weapon in his hand very like one of our guns. He asked my guide if I should like a dozen larks, because baboons (that is what he took me for) fed on this meat. I had scarcely answered yes, when the sportsman fired in the air and twenty or thirty well-roasted larks fell at our feet. There! thought I at once, and we have a proverb in our world about a land where the larks fall ready roasted! Doubtless someone who had come from here.

"You have but to eat", said my demon, "they are skilful enough to mix with their powder and shot a composition which kills, plucks, roasts and seasons their game."

On his recommendation I picked up and ate some of them, and truly I had never in my life tasted anything so delicious.

After breakfast we prepared to depart and with a thousand grimaces, which they use to show their politeness, the host accepted a paper from my demon. I asked him if this were a note of hand for the amount of the bill. He answered, no, he owed him nothing, and that the paper contained verses.

"Verses!" I answered, "are the tavern-keepers here so fond of rhymes?"

"'Tis the money of the country ", replied he, "and our expenses at this place came to a sixain, which I have just given him. I was not afraid of being short of money, for even though we feasted here for eight days we should not spend a sonnet, and I have four on me, with nine epigrams, two odes and an eclogue."

Ha! said I to myself, that is precisely the money which Sorel makes Hortensius use in "Francion" I remember.[44] Doubtless he stole it from here; but how the devil can he have learnt it? It must have been from his mother, for I have heard it said that she was Lunatic.

[Footnote 44: Charles Sorel's _Histoire Comique de Francion_, 1626.]

I asked my demon then if these verses served always as money, as often as they were copied out; he said they did not and continued thus: "When an author has composed some verses he carries them to the mint, where the sworn poets of the kingdom hold their sessions. There the verifying officers test the pieces and if they are judged to be of a good alloy they are estimated, not according to their weight, but according to their wit, and so no one dies of hunger except the blockheads, and men of wit live in perpetual good cheer."

I wondered in a kind of ecstasy at the judicious polity of that country and he went on in this way: "There are other people who keep inns in a very different way. When you leave them they ask of you, according to your expenses, a note of hand for the Next World; and when they have it they enter it in a tall ledger, which they call their account with God, much in this way:

_Item_: The value of so many verses delivered on such a day by such an one which God must repay me from the first funds that come in on presentation of this note of hand.

When they feel themselves ill and in danger of dying they have these registers torn into pieces and swallow them because they think that unless they are digested God cannot read them."

This conversation did not prevent us from continuing our journey, that is, my carrier went on all fours underneath me and I rode astride. I will not particularise any further the adventures which delayed us until we arrived at last at the King's residence. I was taken straight to the Palace. The Nobles received me with much more moderate surprise than the people had done when we passed through the streets, but their conclusion was the same, to wit, that I was without doubt the female of the Queen's little animal. My guide interpreted it thus, but he himself did not understand the enigma and did not know what the Queen's little animal was. We were soon enlightened on this point, for the King some time after commanded him to be brought thither. About half an hour afterwards a little man about my own size, walking on two legs, came in, accompanied by a troupe of monkeys wearing ruffs and Spanish slops. As soon as he saw me he accosted me with a "Criado de vouestra merced"; and I replied to his courtesy in similar terms.[45] Alas! they had no sooner seen us speak to each other than they all believed their prejudice had been truth, and this meeting produced no other result, for the opinion of the spectator most favourable to us was that our conversation was merely that we were grunting with joy at being coupled, and that a natural instinct made us hum. The little man told me he was an European, a native of old Castile, that by means of birds he had conveyed himself to the world of the Moon wherein we now were, that he fell into the Queen's hands and she had taken him for a monkey, because it happens they dress their monkeys in Spanish clothes, and that when she found him dressed in this manner on his arrival, she had not doubted he belonged to the species.

[Footnote 45: This Spaniard is introduced by Cyrano because in Godwin's _Man in the Moon_, of which a French translation appeared in March 1648, one Gonzales reaches the Moon in a car drawn by gansas. See Appendix I.]

"We must suppose", I replied, "that after having tried all other kinds of clothes, they found none more ridiculous, and so they dressed them in this fashion, since they only keep these animals to amuse themselves."

"You do not understand", he said, "the dignity of our nation, since the universe only produced men for the purpose of giving us slaves, and for us Nature can only engender subjects of mirth."[46]

[Footnote 46: Meaning, I suppose, that everything which is not Spanish is ridiculous.]

He then besought me to tell him how I had dared to rise to the Moon in the machine of which I had spoken to him. I replied that this was because he had taken away the birds on which I had intended to go. He smiled at this jest and about a quarter of an hour afterwards the King commanded his monkey-keeper to take us away, with strict orders to make the Spaniard and me lie together to multiply our species in his kingdom. The Prince's command was carried out in every point and I was very glad of it because of the pleasure I took in having some one to converse with during the solitude of my brutification. One day my male (they took me for the female) told me that the real reason that had obliged him to wander all over the earth and finally to abandon it for the Moon, was that he could not find a single country where even the imagination was free.

"Observe", said he, "unless you wear a square cap, a chaperon or a cassock, whatever excellent things you may say, if they are against the principles of these diplomaed doctors, you are an idiot, a madman or an atheist. In my own country they tried to put me into the Inquisition because I maintained to the very beard of these pig-headed pedants that there is a void in Nature and that I knew no matter in the world heavier than another."

I asked him with what probabilities he supported an opinion so little received, and he replied: "To understand that, you must suppose there is only one element; for although we see water, earth, air and fire separate, we never find them so perfectly pure but that they are mingled with each other. When, for example, you look at fire, it is not fire, it is nothing but air greatly expanded; air is only very extended water, and water is only melted earth; while the earth itself is nothing but very contracted water. Thus, by examining matter seriously you will find it is but one substance, which like an excellent actor plays many parts in many kinds of dresses here below. Otherwise we should have to admit as many elements as there are sorts of bodies. And if you ask me why fire burns and water cools, seeing that they are the same matter, I reply that this matter acts by sympathy according to the disposition it is in at the time it acts. Fire, which is nothing but earth still more expanded than it is when it makes air, tries to change all it meets with into itself by sympathy. Thus, the heat of coal, which is the most subtle fire and the most fit to penetrate a body, glides between the pores of our mass, at first makes us expand, because it is a new matter filling us and making us give off sweat; this sweat, expanded by the fire, changes into vapour and becomes air; this air, still further melted by the heat of the antiperistasis or of the globes that are neighbours to it, is called fire, and the earth, abandoned by the cold and by the damp which bind together all our parts, falls down as earth. On the other hand, water, although it only differs from the matter of fire in that it is more closely packed, does not burn us, because as it is contracted it sympathetically requires the bodies it meets to contract; so the cold we feel is nothing but the effect of our flesh, which retires upon itself through the neighbourhood of earth or water compelling it to resemble them. Hence dropsical patients, filled with water, change into water all the food they take; and similarly those who are bilious change into bile all the blood formed by their liver. But if you suppose that there is only one element it is very certain that all bodies, each according to its quality, incline equally to the centre of the earth.

"But you may ask why gold, iron, metals, earth and wood fall more rapidly to the centre than a sponge, if not because the last is filled with air which tends naturally upwards! That is not the reason at all and I reply to you in this way: Although a stone falls with more rapidity than a feather, both have the same inclination to fall; but, if the earth were pierced right through, a cannon-ball would fall more rapidly to the centre than a bladder filled with air. The reason for this is that this mass of metal is a great deal of earth squeezed into a small space and that this air is a very little earth expanded into a great deal of space; for all the particles of matter which reside in this iron, interlocked as they are with each other, increase their strength by union, because by being compact they form many fighting against few, since a portion of air equal in size to the bullet is not equal to it in quantity; and so, yielding under the burden of those more numerous than itself and as impatient, it allows itself to be broken through in order to give them free way.

"Not to prove this with a string of reasons: tell me truly how are we wounded by a pike, a sword or a dagger if it is not that steel is a matter whose particles are nearer together and more pressed against each other than those of our flesh, whose pores and whose softness show that it contains a very little matter spread through a wide space, and that the iron point which pierces us is an almost innumerable quantity of matter directed against a very little flesh, and so forces it to yield to the stronger party, just as a compact squadron pierces a whole line of battle which is widely extended? Why is a red-hot steel ingot hotter than a burning block of wood, if it is not because the ingot contains more fire in less space attached to all the particles of the piece of metal than there is in a log, which is very spongy and consequently contains a great deal of void; and, since void is simply the absence of Being, it cannot be susceptible to the form of fire? But, you will object, to me: 'You suppose a void as if you had proved it, and that is the very matter we are disputing!' Well! I will prove it to you, and although this difficulty is the sister of the Gordian knot, my arms are strong enough to be its Alexander.

"Let the stupid vulgar who only think they are men because a Doctor has told them so, answer me, I beg them. Admit there is only one matter, as I think I have proved: how does it happen that it expands and contracts according to its desire? How does it happen that a piece of earth by continually condensing becomes a pebble? Have the particles of this pebble entered into each other, in such a manner that where one grain of sand was placed, there, in the very same point, lodges another grain of sand? No, that cannot be, even according to their own principles, since bodies do not penetrate each other; but this matter must have drawn closer together and, if you will, have grown smaller by filling up the void space of its habitation.

"To say that it is incomprehensible for there to be nothing in the world and that we should be partly composed of nothing--eh! why not? Is not the whole world enveloped in nothing? Since you admit this point, confess that it is as easy for the world to have nothing inside it as nothing outside.

"I see very well that you are about to ask me why water, restrained by frost in a vase, bursts it, if not to prevent there being a void? But I reply that this only happens because the air above, which tends to the centre just as much as earth and water, meeting with a vacant lodging on the high-road to this country, goes to take up its abode there; if it finds the pores of this vessel, that is to say the roads which lead to this void room, too narrow, too long and too tortuous, by breaking the vase it satisfies its impatience to arrive more speedily at the resting-place.

"But, without wasting my time in answering all their objections, I dare to say that if there were no void there would be no movement, or we must admit the penetration of bodies; for it would be too ridiculous to believe that when a fly agitates a portion of air with its wing this portion drives another before it, this other portion drives another, and that thus the movement of a flea's little toe makes a bump beyond the world. When they are at their wits' end they take refuge in rarefaction; but, in good faith, when a body rarefies how can one particle of the mass draw away from another particle without leaving a void between them? Would it not have been necessary that these two bodies, which have just separated, should have been at the same time in the same place where this third was, and so that all three should have penetrated each other? I am quite prepared for you to ask me why we draw up water against its inclination through a tube, a syringe or a pump; but I reply that the water is compelled and that it does not turn from its road because of its fear of a void but because it is joined with the air by an imperceptible link and so is lifted up when we lift the air which holds it.

"This is not a thorny matter to understand for those who know the perfect circle and delicate chain of the Elements; for if you consider attentively the mud made by the marriage of earth and water you will find that it is neither earth nor water but that it is the medium of the contract of these two enemies; in the same way water and air reciprocally send out a mist which leans to the humours of both to procure their peace, and air reconciles itself with fire by a mediating exhalation which unites them."

I think he would have gone on talking but they brought us our food, and since we were hungry I shut my ears and he his mouth to open our stomachs.

I remember that when we were philosophizing on another occasion, for neither of us liked to converse of frivolous or low things, he said: "I am sorry to see a wit like yours infected with vulgar errors; you must know, in spite of the pedantry of Aristotle which rings to-day through all the class-rooms of your France, that all is in all; that is to say that in water, for example, there is fire, in fire there is water, in air there is earth, and in earth there is air. Although this opinion would make the _Scolares_ open their eyes as wide as salt-cellars, it is easier to prove it than to get it accepted.

"First of all I ask them whether water does not engender fish. When they deny it I shall order them to dig a ditch and to fill it with syrup of water-jug which, if they like, they may pass through a sieve to escape the objections of the blind and if after some time they find no fish in it I will drink all the water they have put there; but if, as I do not doubt, they do find fish there, it is a certain proof that it contains salt and fire; consequently it is not a very difficult enterprise to find water in fire. Let them select a fire the most detached from matter, like comets, there is always a quantity of water in it; for if the unctuous humour which engenders them, reduced to sulphur by the heat of the antiperistasis which lights them, did not find an obstacle to its violence in the damp cold which tempers and combats it, it would be consumed in a flash. They will not deny that there is now air in the earth, or else they have never heard of the dreadful shakings which agitate the mountains of Sicily; moreover, we see that the earth is porous down even to the grains of sand which compose it. However, nobody has yet said that these hollows are filled with void; it will therefore not be thought objectionable to say that they contain air. It remains for me to prove that there is earth in the air; but I scarcely deign to take the trouble, since you may convince yourself of it as often as you see falling upon your heads those legions of motes, so numerous that they stifle arithmetic.

"But let us pass from simple to composite bodies. They will supply me with many more frequent subjects to prove that all things are in all things; not that they change into each other as your Peripatetics twitter, for I will maintain to their beards that first principles mingle, separate and mingle once more; so that what has once been created water by the wise Creator of the World will be so always; and I do not advance any maxim that I do not prove, as they do.

"Take, I beseech you, a log or some other combustible matter and set fire to it. When it is burnt up they will say that what was wood has become fire. But I maintain the contrary, and say that there is no more fire now when it is in flames than before a taper had been put to it; but the fire which was hidden in the log, prevented by cold and damp from expanding and acting, was supported by the foreign light, rallied its forces against the moisture which stifled it and took possession of the field occupied by its enemy. Thus it triumphs over its gaoler and shows itself without impediment. Do you not see how the water retreats by the two ends of the log, still hot and smoking from the fight? The upper flame you see is the most subtle fire and the freest from matter and therefore the most ready to return home; however, it unites in a pyramid up to a certain height in order to break through the thick dampness of the air resisting it. But as it mounts and frees itself little by little from the violent company of its enemies, it roves freely because it meets nothing hostile to its passage, and this negligence is often the cause of a second prison, for the fire, travelling separately, will lose itself sometimes in a cloud and if it meets there with a sufficiently large number of other fires to make head against the vapour they join together, they rumble, they thunder, they lighten and the death of innocent creatures is often the effect of the excited anger of dead things. If the fire is embarrassed by the importunate crudities of the middle region and is not strong enough to defend itself against them, it yields itself to the discretion of the cloud which, being constrained by its weight to fall back upon the earth, takes its prisoner with it and so this unhappy fire, enclosed in a drop of water, may perhaps find itself at the foot of an oak, whose animal fire will invite the poor wanderer to lodge with it. And thus it returns to the same state it left a few days before.