B: But if I tell you that I want neither the one nor the other?

A: You will be answering like someone who says: "Some believe Cardinal Mazarin to be dead, others believe him to be alive, and as for me I believe neither the one nor the other."

B: Well, I want to be married.

A: Ah! that is an answer. Why do you want to be married?

B: Because I am in love with a beautiful, sweet, well-bred young girl, who is fairly rich and sings very well, whose parents are very honest people, and because I flatter myself I am loved by her, and very welcome to her family.

A: That is a reason. You see that you cannot wish without reason. I declare to you that you are free to marry; that is, that you have the power to sign the contract, have your nuptials, and sleep with your wife.

B: How now! I cannot wish without reason? And what will become of that other proverb: Sit pro ratione voluntas; my will is my reason, I wish because I wish?

A: That is absurd, my dear fellow; there would be in you an effect without a cause.

B: What! When I play at odds and evens, I have a reason for choosing evens rather than odds?

A: Yes, undoubtedly.

B: And what is that reason, if you please?

A: The reason is that the idea of even rather than the opposite idea presents itself to your mind. It would be comic that there were cases where you wished because there was a cause of wishing, and that there were cases where you wished without any cause. When you wish to be married, you evidently feel the dominating reason; you do not feel it when you are playing at odds and evens; and yet there certainly must be one.

B: But, I repeat, I am not free then?

A: Your will is not free, but your actions are. You are free to act, when you have the power to act.

B: But all the books I have read on the liberty of indifference....

A: What do you mean by the liberty of indifference?

B: I mean the liberty of spitting on the right or on the left, of sleeping on my right side or on my left, of taking a walk of four turns or five.

A: Really the liberty you would have there would be a comic liberty! God would have given you a fine gift! It would really be something to boast of! Of what use to you would be a power which was exercised only on such futile occasions? But the fact is that it is ridiculous to suppose the will to wish to spit on the right. Not only is this will to wish absurd, but it is certain that several trifling circumstances determine you in these acts that you call indifferent. You are no more free in these acts than in the others. But, I repeat, you are free at all times, in all places, as soon as you do what you wish to do.

B: I suspect you are right. I will think about it.[13]

FOOTNOTES:

[13] See "Free-Will."



LIBRARY

A big library has this in it of good, that it dismays those who look at it. Two hundred thousand volumes discourage a man tempted to print; but unfortunately he at once says to himself: "People do not read all those books, and they may read mine." He compares himself to a drop of water who complains of being lost in the ocean and ignored: a genius had pity on it; he caused it to be swallowed by an oyster; it became the most beautiful pearl in the Orient, and was the chief ornament in the throne of the Great Mogul. Those who are only compilers, imitators, commentators, splitters of phrases, usurious critics, in short, those on whom a genius has no pity, will always remain drops of water.

Our man works in his garret, therefore, in the hope of becoming a pearl.

It is true that in this immense collection of books there are about a hundred and ninety-nine thousand which will never be read, from cover to cover at least; but one may need to consult some of them once in a lifetime. It is a great advantage for whoever wishes to learn to find at his hand in the king's palace the volume and page he seeks, without being kept waiting a moment. It is one of the most noble institutions. No expense is more magnificent and more useful.

The public library of the King of France is the finest in the whole world, less on account of the number and rarity of the volumes than of the ease and courtesy with which the librarians lend them to all scholars. This library is incontestably the most precious monument there is in France.

This astounding multitude of books should not scare. We have already remarked that Paris contains about seven hundred thousand men, that one cannot live with them all, and that one chooses three or four friends. Thus must one no more complain of the multitude of books than of the multitude of citizens.

A man who wishes to learn a little about his existence, and who has no time to waste, is quite embarrassed. He wishes to read simultaneously Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle who wrote against them, Leibnitz who disputed with Bayle, Clarke who disputed with Leibnitz, Malebranche who differed from them all, Locke who passed as having confounded Malebranche, Stillingfleet who thought he had vanquished Locke, Cudworth who thinks himself above them because he is understood by no one. One would die of old age before having thumbed the hundredth part of the metaphysical romances.

One is very content to have the most ancient books, as one inquires into the most ancient medals. It is that which makes the honour of a library. The oldest books in the world are the "Kings" of the Chinese, the "Shastabad" of the Brahmins, of which Mr. Holwell has brought to our knowledge admirable passages, what remains of the ancient Zarathustra, the fragments of Sanchoniathon which Eusebius has preserved for us and which bears the characteristics of the most remote antiquity. I do not speak of the "Pentateuch" which is above all one could say of it.

We still have the prayer of the real Orpheus, which the hierophant recited in the old Greek mysteries. "Walk in the path of justice, worship the sole master of the universe. He is one; He is sole by Himself. All beings owe Him their existence; He acts in them and by them. He sees everything, and never has been seen by mortal eyes."

St. Clement of Alexandria, the most learned of the fathers of the Church, or rather the only scholar in profane antiquity, gives him almost always the name of Orpheus of Thrace, of Orpheus the Theologian, to distinguish him from those who wrote later under his name.

We have no longer anything either of Museus or of Linus. A few passages from these predecessors of Homer would well be an adornment to a library.

Augustus had formed the library called the Palatine. The statue of Apollo presided over it. The emperor embellished it with busts of the best authors. One saw in Rome twenty-nine great public libraries. There are now more than four thousand important libraries in Europe. Choose which suits you, and try not to be bored.



LIMITS OF THE HUMAN MIND

Someone asked Newton one day why he walked when he wanted to, and how his arm and his hand moved at his will. He answered manfully that he had no idea. "But at least," his interlocutor said to him, "you who understand so well the gravitation of the planets will tell me why they turn in one direction rather than in another!" And he again confessed that he had no idea.

Those who taught that the ocean was salt for fear that it might become putrid, and that the tides were made to bring our ships into port (The Abbe Pluche in "The Spectacle of Nature"), were somewhat ashamed when the reply was made to them that the Mediterranean has ports and no ebb. Musschenbroeck himself fell into this inadvertence.

Has anyone ever been able to say precisely how a log is changed on the hearth into burning carbon, and by what mechanism lime is kindled by fresh water?

Is the first principle of the movement of the heart in animals properly understood? does one know clearly how generation is accomplished? has one guessed what gives us sensations, ideas, memory? We do not understand the essence of matter any more than the children who touch its surface.

Who will teach us by what mechanism this grain of wheat that we throw into the ground rises again to produce a pipe laden with an ear of corn, and how the same soil produces an apple at the top of this tree, and a chestnut on its neighbour? Many teachers have said—"What do I not know?" Montaigne used to say—"What do I know?"

Ruthlessly trenchant fellow, wordy pedagogue, meddlesome theorist, you seek the limits of your mind. They are at the end of your nose.



LOCAL CRIMES

Traverse the whole earth, you will find that theft, murder, adultery, calumny are regarded as crimes which society condemns and curbs; but should what is approved in England, and condemned in Italy, be punished in Italy as an outrage against the whole of humanity? That is what I call a local crime. Does not that which is criminal only in the enclosure of some mountains, or between two rivers, demand of judges more indulgence than those outrages which are held in horror in all countries? Should not the judge say to himself: "I should not dare punish at Ragusa what I punish at Loretto"? Should not this reflection soften in his heart the hardness that it is only too easy to contract during the long exercise of his office?

You know the kermesses in Flanders; in the last century they were carried to a point of indecency which might revolt eyes unaccustomed to these spectacles. This is how Christmas was celebrated in some towns. First there appeared a young man half naked, with wings on his back; he recited the Ave Maria to a young girl who answered him fiat, and the angel kissed her on the mouth: then a child enclosed in a great cardboard cock cried, imitating the cock's cry: Puer natus est nobis. A big ox bellowed ubi, which it pronounced oubi; a sheep bleated Bethlehem. An ass cried hihanus, to signify eamus; a long procession, preceded by four fools with baubles and rattles, closed the performance. There remain to-day traces of these popular devotions, which among more educated peoples would be taken for profanations. A bad-tempered Swiss, more drunk maybe than those who played the roles of ox and ass, came to words with them in Louvain; blows were given; the people wanted to hang the Swiss, who escaped with difficulty.

The same man had a violent quarrel at the Hague in Holland for having stoutly taken Barneveldt's part against an extravagant Gomarist. He was put into prison in Amsterdam for having said that priests are the scourge of humanity and the source of all our misfortunes. "What!" he said. "If one believes that good works make for salvation, one finds oneself in a dungeon; if one laughs at a cock and an ass, one risks being hanged." This adventure, burlesque though it is, makes it quite clear that one can be reprehensible on one or two points in our hemisphere, and be absolutely innocent in the rest of the world.



LOVE

There are so many sorts of love that one does not know to whom to address oneself for a definition of it. The name of "love" is given boldly to a caprice lasting a few days, a sentiment without esteem, gallants' affectations, a frigid habit, a romantic fantasy, relish followed by prompt disrelish: people give this name to a thousand chimeras.

If philosophers want to probe to the bottom this barely philosophical matter, let them meditate on the banquet of Plato, in which Socrates, honourable lover of Alcibiades and Agathon, converses with them on the metaphysics of love.

Lucretius speaks of it more as a natural philosopher: Virgil follows in the steps of Lucretius; amor omnibus idem.

It is the stuff of nature broidered by nature. Do you want an idea of love? look at the sparrows in your garden; look at your pigeons; look at the bull which is brought to the heifer; look at this proud horse which two of your grooms lead to the quiet mare awaiting him; she draws aside her tail to welcome him; see how her eyes sparkle; hark to the neighing; watch the prancing, the curvetting, the ears pricked, the mouth opening with little convulsions, the swelling nostrils, the flaring breath, the manes rising and floating, the impetuous movement with which he hurls himself on the object which nature has destined for him; but be not jealous of him, and think of the advantages of the human species; in love they compensate for all those that nature has given to the animals—strength, beauty, nimbleness, speed.

There are animals, even, who have no enjoyment in possession. Scale fish are deprived of this delight: the female throws millions of eggs on the mud; the male coming across them passes over them, and fertilizes them with his seed, without troubling about the female to whom they belong.

Most animals that pair, taste pleasure only by a single sense, and as soon as the appetite is satisfied, everything is extinguished. No animal, apart from you, knows what kissing is; the whole of your body is sensitive; your lips especially enjoy a voluptuousness that nothing can tire; and this pleasure belongs to no species but yours: you can give yourself up to love at any time, and the animals have but a fixed time. If you reflect on these superiorities, you will say with the Count of Rochester—"In a country of atheists love would cause the Deity to be worshipped."

As men have received the gift of perfecting all that nature accords them, they have perfected love. Cleanliness, the care of oneself, by rendering the skin more delicate, increase the pleasure of contact; and attention to one's health renders the organs of voluptuousness more sensitive. All the other sentiments that enter into that of love, just like metals which amalgamate with gold: friendship, regard, come to help; the faculties of mind and body are still further chains.

Self-love above all tightens all these bonds. One applauds oneself for one's choice, and a crowd of illusions form the decoration of the building of which nature has laid the foundations.

That is what you have above the animals. But if you taste so many pleasures unknown to them, how many sorrows too of which the beasts have no idea! What is frightful for you is that over three-fourths of the earth nature has poisoned the pleasures of love and the sources of life with an appalling disease to which man alone is subject, and which infects in him the organs of generation alone.

It is in no wise with this plague as with so many other maladies that are the result of our excesses. It was not debauch that introduced it into the world. Phryne, Lais, Flora, Messalina and those like them, were not attacked by it; it was born in some islands where men lived in innocence, and thence spread itself over the ancient world.

If ever one could accuse nature of despising her work, of contradicting her plans, of acting against her designs, it is in this detestable scourge which has soiled the earth with horror and filth. Is that the best of all possible worlds? What! if Caesar, Antony, Octavius never had this disease, was it not possible for it not to cause the death of Francois I.? "No," people say, "things were ordered thus for the best." I want to believe it; but it is sad for those to whom Rabelais dedicated his book.

Erotic philosophers have often debated the question of whether Heloise could still really love Abelard when he was a monk and emasculate? One of these qualities did very great harm to the other.

But console yourself, Abelard, you were loved; the root of the hewn tree still retains a remnant of sap; the imagination aids the heart. One can still be happy at table even though one eats no longer. Is it love? is it simply a memory? is it friendship? All that is composed of something indescribable. It is an obscure feeling resembling the fantastic passions retained by the dead in the Elysian fields. The heroes who, during their lifetime, shone in the chariot races, drove imaginary chariots when they were dead. Heloise lived with you on illusions and supplements. She kissed you sometimes, and with all the more pleasure that having taken a vow at the Paraclet monastery to love you no longer, her kisses thereby became more precious as more guilty. A woman can barely be seized with a passion for a eunuch: but she can keep her passion for her lover become eunuch, provided that he remains lovable.

It is not the same, ladies, for a lover who has grown old in service; the externals subsist no longer; the wrinkles horrify; the white eyebrows shock; the lost teeth disgust; the infirmities estrange: all that one can do is to have the virtue of being nurse, and of tolerating what one has loved. It is burying a dead man.



LUXURY

People have declaimed against luxury for two thousand years, in verse and in prose, and people have always delighted in it.

What has not been said of the early Romans when these brigands ravaged and pillaged the harvests; when, to enlarge their poor village, they destroyed the poor villages of the Volscians and the Samnites? They were disinterested, virtuous men; they had not yet been able to steal either gold, silver, or precious stones, because there were not any in the little towns they plundered. Their woods and their marshes produced neither pheasants nor partridges, and people praise their temperance.

When gradually they had pillaged everything, stolen everything from the far end of the Adriatic Gulf to the Euphrates, and when they had enough intelligence to enjoy the fruit of their plundering; when they cultivated the arts, when they tasted of all pleasures, and when they even made the vanquished taste of them, they ceased then, people say, to be wise and honest men.

All these declamations reduce themselves to proving that a robber must never either eat the dinner he has taken, or wear the coat he has pilfered, or adorn himself with the ring he has filched. He should throw all that, people say, in the river, so as to live like an honest man. Say rather that he should not have stolen. Condemn brigands when they pillage; but do not treat them as senseless when they enjoy. Honestly, when a large number of English sailors enriched themselves at the taking of Pondicherry and Havana, were they wrong to enjoy themselves later in London, as the price of the trouble they had had in the depths of Asia and America?

The declaimers want one to bury in the ground the wealth one has amassed by the fortune of arms, by agriculture, by commerce and by industry. They cite Lacedaemon; why do they not cite also the republic of San Marino? What good did Sparto to Greece? Did she ever have Demosthenes, Sophocles, Apelles, Phidias? The luxury of Athens produced great men in every sphere; Sparta had a few captains, and in less number even than other towns. But how fine it is that as small a republic as Lacedaemon retains its poverty.[14]

One arrives at death as well by lacking everything as by enjoying what can make life pleasant. The Canadian savage subsists, and comes to old age like the English citizen who has an income of fifty thousand guineas. But who will ever compare the land of the Iroquois to England?

Let the republic of Ragusa and the canton of Zug make sumptuary laws, they are right, the poor man must not spend beyond his powers; but I have read somewhere:

"Learn that luxury enriches a great state, even if it ruins a small."[15]

If by luxury you understand excess, everyone knows that excess in any form is pernicious, in abstinence as in gluttony, in economy as in generosity. I do not know how it has happened that in my village where the land is ungrateful, the taxes heavy, the prohibition against exporting the corn one has sown intolerable, there is nevertheless barely a cultivator who has not a good cloth coat, and who is not well shod and well fed. If this cultivator toiled in his fields in his fine coat, with white linen, his hair curled and powdered, there, certainly, would be the greatest luxury, and the most impertinent; but that a bourgeois of Paris or London should appear at the theatre clad like a peasant, there would be the most vulgar and ridiculous niggardliness.

When scissors, which are certainly not of the remotest antiquity, were invented, what did people not say against the first men who pared their nails, and who cut part of the hair which fell on their noses? They were treated, without a doubt, as fops and prodigals, who bought an instrument of vanity at a high price, in order to spoil the Creator's handiwork. What an enormous sin to cut short the horn which God made to grow at the end of our fingers! It was an outrage against the Deity! It was much worse when shirts and socks were invented. One knows with what fury the aged counsellors who had never worn them cried out against the young magistrates who were addicted to this disastrous luxury.[16]

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Lacedaemon avoided luxury only by preserving the community or equality of property; but she did not preserve either the one or the other save by having the land cultivated by an enslaved people. The existence of the equality or community of property supposes the existence of an enslaved people. The Spartans had virtue, just like highwaymen, inquisitors and all classes of men whom habit has familiarized with a species of crime, to the point of committing them without remorse.

[15] The sumptuary laws are by their nature a violation of the right of property. If in a little state there is not a great inequality of fortune, there will be no luxury; if this inequality exists, luxury is the remedy for it. It is her sumptuary laws that have lost Geneva her liberty.

[16] If by luxury one understands everything that is beyond the necessary, luxury is a natural consequence of the progress of the human species; and to reason consequently every enemy of luxury should believe with Rousseau that the state of happiness and virtue for man is that, not of the savage, but of the orang-outang. One feels that it would be absurd to regard as an evil the comforts which all men would enjoy: also, does one not generally give the name of luxury to the superfluities which only a small number of individuals can enjoy. In this sense, luxury is a necessary consequence of property, without which no society can subsist, and of a great inequality between fortunes which is the consequence, not of the right of property, but of bad laws. Moralists should address their sermons to the legislators, and not to individuals, because it is in the order of possible things that a virtuous and enlightened man may have the power to make reasonable laws, and it is not in human nature for all the rich men of a country to renounce through virtue procuring for themselves for money the enjoyments of pleasure or vanity.



GENERAL REFLECTION ON MAN

It needs twenty years to lead man from the plant state in which he is within his mother's womb, and the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of the reason begins to appear. It has needed thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.



MAN IN THE IRON MASK

The author of the "Siecle de Louis XIV."[17] is the first to speak of the man in the iron mask in an authenticated history. The reason is that he was very well informed about the anecdote which astonishes the present century, which will astonish posterity, and which is only too true. He was deceived about the date of the death of this singularly unfortunate unknown. The date of his burial at St. Paul was March 3rd, 1703, and not 1704. (Note.—According to a certificate reported by Saint-Foix, the date was November 20th, 1703.)

He was imprisoned first of all at Pignerol before being so on St. Margaret's Islands, and later in the Bastille; always under the same man's guard, Saint-Mars, who saw him die. Father Griffet, Jesuit, has communicated to the public the diary of the Bastille, which testifies to the dates. He had this diary without difficulty, for he held the delicate position of confessor of prisoners imprisoned in the Bastille.

The man in the iron mask is a riddle to which everyone wishes to guess the answer. Some say that he was the Duc de Beaufort: but the Duc de Beaufort was killed by the Turks at the defence of Candia, in 1669; and the man in the iron mask was at Pignerol, in 1662. Besides, how would one have arrested the Duc de Beaufort surrounded by his army? how would one have transferred him to France without anybody knowing anything about it? and why should he have been put in prison, and why this mask?

Others have considered the Comte de Vermandois, natural son of Louis XIV., who died publicly of the small-pox in 1683, with the army, and was buried in the town of Arras.

Later it was thought that the Duke of Monmouth, whose head King James II. had cut off publicly in London in 1685, was the man in the iron mask. It would have been necessary for him to be resuscitated, and then for him to change the order of the times, for him to put the year 1662 in place of 1685; for King James who never pardoned anyone, and who on that account deserved all his misfortunes, to have pardoned the Duke of Monmouth, and to have caused the death, in his place, of a man exactly like him. It would have been necessary to find this double who would have been so kind as to have his neck cut off in public in order to save the Duke of Monmouth. It would have been necessary for the whole of England to have been under a misapprehension; for James then to have sent his earnest entreaties to Louis XIV. to be so good as to serve as his constable and gaoler. Then Louis XIV. having done King James this little favour, would not have failed to have the same consideration for King William and for Queen Anne, with whom he was at war; and he would carefully have preserved in these two monarchs' consideration his dignity of gaoler, with which King James had honoured him.

All these illusions being dissipated, it remains to be learned who was this prisoner who was always masked, the age at which he died, and under what name he was buried. It is clear that if he was not allowed to pass into the courtyard of the Bastille, if he was not allowed to speak to his doctor, unless covered by a mask, it was for fear that in his features might be recognized some too striking resemblance. He might show his tongue, and never his face. As regards his age, he himself said to the Bastille apothecary, a few days before his death, that he thought he was about sixty; and Master Marsolan, surgeon to the Marechal de Richelieu, and later to the Duc d'Orleans, regent, son-in-law of this apothecary, has repeated it to me more than once.

Finally, why give him an Italian name? he was always called Marchiali! He who writes this article knows more about it, maybe, than Father Griffet, and will not say more.

PUBLISHERS NOTE[18]

It is surprising to see so many scholars and so many intelligent and sagacious writers torment themselves with guessing who can have been the famous man in the iron mask, without the simplest, most natural, most probable idea ever presenting itself to them. Once the fact as M. de Voltaire reports it is admitted, with its circumstances; the existence of a prisoner of so singular a species, put in the rank of the best authenticated historical truths; it seems that not only is nothing easier than to imagine who this prisoner was, but that it is even difficult for there to be two opinions on the subject. The author of this article would have communicated his opinion earlier, if he had not believed that this idea must already have come to many others, and if he were not persuaded that it was not worth while giving as a discovery what, according to him, jumps to the eyes of all who read this anecdote.

However, as for some time past this event has divided men's minds, and as quite recently the public has again been given a letter in which it is claimed as proved that this celebrated prisoner was a secretary of the Duke of Mantua (which cannot be reconciled with the great marks of respect shown by M. de Saint-Mars to his prisoner), the author has thought it his duty to tell at last what has been his opinion for many years. Maybe this conjecture will put an end to all other researches, unless the secret be revealed by those who can be its guardians, in such a way as to remove all doubts.

He will not amuse himself with refuting those who have imagined that this prisoner could be the Comte de Vermandois, the Duc de Beaufort, or the Duke of Monmouth. The scholarly and very wise author of this last opinion has well refuted the others; but he had based his own opinion essentially merely on the impossibility of finding in Europe some other prince whose detention it would have been of the very highest importance should not be known. M. de Saint-Foix is right, if he means to speak only of princes whose existence was known; but why has nobody yet thought of supposing that the iron mask might have been an unknown prince, brought up in secret, and whose existence it was important should remain unknown?

The Duke of Monmouth was not for France a prince of such great importance; and one does not see even what could have engaged this power, at least after the death of this duke and of James II., to make so great a secret of his detention, if indeed he was the iron mask. It is hardly probable either that M. de Louvois and M. de Saint-Mars would have shown the Duke of Monmouth the profound respect which M. de Voltaire assures they showed the iron mask.

The author conjectures, from the way that M. de Voltaire has told the facts, that this celebrated historian is as persuaded as he is of the suspicion which he is going, he says, to bring to light; but that M. de Voltaire, as a Frenchman, did not wish, he adds, to publish point-blank, particularly as he had said enough for the answer to the riddle not to be difficult to guess. Here it is, he continues, as I see it.

"The iron mask was undoubtedly a brother and an elder brother of Louis XIV., whose mother had that taste for fine linen on which M. de Voltaire lays stress. It was in reading the Memoirs of that time, which report this anecdote about the queen, that, recalling this same taste in the iron mask, I doubted no longer that he was her son: a fact of which all the other circumstances had persuaded me already.

"It is known that Louis XIII. had not lived with the queen for a long time; that the birth of Louis XIV. was due only to a happy chance skilfully induced; a chance which absolutely obliged the king to sleep in the same bed with the queen. This is how I think the thing came to pass.

"The queen may have thought that it was her fault that no heir was born to Louis XIII. The birth of the iron mask will have undeceived her. The cardinal to whom she will have confided the fact will have known, for more than one reason, how to turn the secret to account; he will have thought of making use of this event for his own benefit and for the benefit of the state. Persuaded by this example that the queen could give the king children, the plan which produced the chance of one bed for the king and the queen was arranged in consequence. But the queen and the cardinal, equally impressed with the necessity of hiding from Louis XIII. the iron mask's existence, will have had him brought up in secret. This secret will have been a secret for Louis XIV. until Cardinal Mazarin's death.

"But this monarch learning then that he had a brother, and an elder brother whom his mother could not disacknowledge, who further bore maybe the marked features which betrayed his origin, reflecting that this child born during marriage could not, without great inconvenience and a horrible scandal, be declared illegitimate after Louis XIII.'s death, Louis XIV. will have judged that he could not use a wiser or juster means than the one he employed in order to assure his own tranquillity and the peace of the state; means which relieved him of committing a cruelty which policy would have represented as necessary to a monarch less conscientious and less magnanimous than Louis XIV.

"It seems to me, our author continues, that the more one knows of the history of those times, the more one must be struck by these assembled circumstances which are in favour of such a supposition."

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Voltaire.

[18] This note, given as a publisher's note in the 1771 edition, passes among many men of letters as being by Voltaire himself. He knew of this edition, and he never contradicted the opinion there advanced on the subject of the man in the iron mask.

He was the first to speak of this man. He always combated all the conjectures made about the mask: he always spoke as though better informed than others on the subject, and as though unwilling to tell all he knew.

There is a letter in circulation from Mlle. de Valois, written to the Duke, afterward Marechal de Richelieu, where she boasts of having learned from the Duc d'Orleans, her father, under strange conditions, who the man in the iron mask was; this man, she says, was a twin brother of Louis XIV., born a few hours after him.

Either this letter, which it was so useless, so indecent, so dangerous to read, is a supposititious letter, or the regent, in giving his daughter the reward she had so nobly acquired, thought to weaken the danger there was in revealing a state secret, by altering the facts, so as to make of this prince a younger son without right to the throne, instead of the heir-apparent to the crown.

But Louis XIV., who had a brother; Louis XIV., whose soul was magnanimous; Louis XIV., who prided himself even on a scrupulous probity, whom history has reproached with no crime, who indeed committed no crime apart from letting himself be too swayed by the counsels of Louvois and the Jesuits; Louis XIV. would never have detained one of his brothers in perpetual prison, in order to forestall the evils announced by an astrologer, in whom he did not believe. He needed more important motives. Eldest son of Louis XIII., acknowledged by this prince, the throne belonged to him; but a son born of Anne of Austria, unknown to her husband, had no rights, and could, nevertheless, try to make himself acknowledged, rend France with a long civil war, win maybe over Louis XIII.'s son, by alleging the right of primogeniture, and substitute a new race for the old race of the Bourbons. These motives, if they did not entirely justify Louis XIV.'s rigour, serve at least to excuse him; and the prisoner, too well-informed of his fate, could be grateful to him for not having listened to more rigorous counsels, counsels which politics have often employed against those who had pretensions to thrones occupied by their competitors.

From his youth Voltaire was connected with the Duc de Richelieu, who was not discreet: if Mlle. de Valois' letter is authentic, he knew of it; but, possessed of a just mind, he felt the error, and sought other information. He was in a position to obtain it; he rectified the truth altered in the letter, as he rectified so many other errors.



MARRIAGE

I came across a reasoner who said: "Engage your subjects to marry as soon as possible; let them be exempt from taxes the first year, and let their tax be distributed over those who at the same age are celibate.

"The more married men you have, the less crime there will be. Look at the frightful records of your registers of crime; you will find there a hundred bachelors hanged or wheeled for one father of a family.

"Marriage makes man wiser and more virtuous. The father of a family, near to committing a crime, is often stopped by his wife whose blood, less feverish than his, makes her gentler, more compassionate, more fearful of theft and murder, more timorous, more religious.

"The father of a family does not want to blush before his children. He fears to leave them a heritage of shame.

"Marry your soldiers, they will not desert any more. Bound to their families, they will be bound also to their fatherland. A bachelor soldier often is nothing but a vagabond, to whom it is indifferent whether he serves the king of Naples or the king of Morocco."

The Roman warriors were married; they fought for their wives and children; and they enslaved the wives and children of other nations.

A great Italian politician, who further was very learned in oriental languages, a very rare thing among our politicians, said to me in my youth: "Caro figlio, remember that the Jews have never had but one good institution, that of having a horror of virginity." If this little race of superstitious intermediaries had not considered marriage as the first law of man, if there had been among them convents of nuns, they were irreparably lost.



MASTER

SECTION I

"Unfortunate that I am to have been born!" said Ardassan Ougli, young page of the great Sultan of the Turks. "If it were only the great Sultan on whom I am dependent; but I am subject to the chief of my oda, to the capigi pasha; and when I receive my pay, I have to bow down to one of the tefterdar's clerks who deducts half of it. Before I was seven years old I had cut off, in spite of myself, in ceremony, the end of my prepuce, and it made me ill for a fortnight. The dervish who prays for us is my master; an iman is still more my master; the mollah is still more my master than the iman. The cadi is another master; the cadi-leskier is master still more; the mufti is much more master than all these together. The grand vizier's kaia can with a word have me thrown into the canal; and the grand vizier, finally, can have my neck wrung at his pleasure, and stuff the skin of my head, without anybody even taking notice.

"How many masters, great God! even if I had as many bodies and as many souls as I have duties to accomplish, I could not attend to everything. Oh, Allah! if only you had made me a screech-owl! I should live free in my hole, and I should eat mice at my ease without masters or servants. That assuredly is man's real destiny; only since he was perverted has he masters. No man was made to serve another man continuously. Each would have charitably aided his fellow, if things were as they should be. The man with eyes would have led the blind man, the active man would have acted as crutch to the cripple. This world would have been the paradise of Mohammed; and it is the hell which is exactly under the pointed bridge."

Thus did Ardassan Ougli speak, after receiving the stirrup-leather from one of his masters.

After a few years Ardassan Ougli became pasha with three tails. He made a prodigious fortune, and he firmly believed that all men, excepting the Great Turk and the Grand Vizier, were born to serve him, and all women to give him pleasure in accordance with his caprice.

SECTION II

How has it been possible for one man to become another man's master, and by what species of incomprehensible magic has he been able to become the master of many other men? On this phenomenon a great number of good volumes have been written; but I give the preference to an Indian fable, because it is short, and because the fables have said everything.

Adimo, the father of all the Indians, had two sons and two daughters by his wife Procriti. The elder son was a giant, the younger was a little hunchback, the two daughters were pretty. As soon as the giant was conscious of his strength, he lay with his two sisters, and made the little hunchback serve him. Of his two sisters, one was his cook, the other his gardener. When the giant wanted to sleep, he started by chaining his little hunchback brother to a tree; and when the brother escaped, he caught him in four strides, and gave him twenty strokes with a length of ox sinew.

The hunchback became submissive and the best subject in the world. The giant, satisfied to see him fulfilling his duties as subject, permitted him to lie with one of his sisters for whom he himself had taken a distaste. The children who came of this marriage were not entirely hunchbacked; but they had sufficiently misshapen forms. They were reared in fear of God and the giant. They received an excellent education; they were taught that their great uncle was giant by divine right, that he could do with his family as pleased him; that if he had a pretty niece or great-niece, she was for him alone without a doubt, and that no one could lie with her until he wanted her no longer.

The giant having died, his son, who was not by a long way as strong and as big as he, thought nevertheless that he, like his father, was giant by divine right. He claimed to make all the men work for him, and to lie with all the women. The family leagued itself against him, he was beaten to death, and the others turned themselves into a republic.

The Siamese, on the contrary, maintain that the family had started by being republican, and that the giant did not come until after a great number of years and dissensions; but all the authors of Benares and Siam agree that mankind lived an infinity of centuries before having the intelligence to make laws; and they prove it by an unanswerable reason, which is that even to-day when everyone plumes himself on his intelligence, no way has been found of making a score of passably good laws.

It is indeed still an insoluble question in India whether republics were established before or after monarchies, whether confusion appeared more horrible to mankind than despotism. I do not know what happened in order of time; but in that of nature it must be agreed that all men being born equal, violence and adroitness made the first masters, the laws made the last.



MEN OF LETTERS

In our barbarous times, when the Franks, the Germans, the Bretons, the Lombards, the Spanish Muzarabs, knew not how either to read or write, there were instituted schools, universities, composed almost entirely of ecclesiastics who, knowing nothing but their own jargon, taught this jargon to those who wished to learn it; the academies came only a long time afterwards; they despised the foolishness of the schools, but did not always dare to rise against them, because there are foolishnesses that are respected provided that they concern respectable things.

The men of letters who have rendered the greatest services to the small number of thinking beings spread over the world, are the isolated writers, the true scholars shut in their studies, who have neither argued on the benches of the universities, nor told half-truths in the academies; and almost all of them have been persecuted. Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

Montesquieu says that the Scythians rent their slaves' eyes, so that they might be less distracted while they were churning their butter; that is just how the inquisition functions, and in the land where this monster reigns almost everybody is blind. In England people have had two eyes for more than two hundred years; the French are starting to open one eye; but sometimes there are men in power who do not want the people to have even this one eye open.

These poor persons in power are like Doctor Balouard of the Italian Comedy, who does not want to be served by anyone but the dolt Harlequin, and who is afraid of having too shrewd a valet.

Compose some odes in praise of My Lord Superbus Fadus, some madrigals for his mistress; dedicate a book on geography to his door-keeper, you will be well-received; enlighten mankind, you will be exterminated.

Descartes was forced to leave his country, Gassendi was calumniated, Arnauld dragged out his days in exile; every philosopher is treated as the prophets were among the Jews.

Who would believe that in the eighteenth century a philosopher was dragged before the secular tribunals, and treated as impious by the tribunals of arguments, for having said that men could not practise the arts if they had no hands? I do not despair that soon the first person who is so insolent as to say that men could not think if they had no heads will be immediately condemned to the galleys; "for," some young graduate will say to him, "the soul is a pure spirit, the head is only matter; God can put the soul in the heel, as well as in the brain; therefore I denounce you as impious."

The greatest misfortune of a man of letters is not perhaps being the object of his confreres' jealousy, the victim of the cabal, the despised of the men of power; but of being judged by fools. Fools go far sometimes, particularly when bigotry is added to ineptitude, and to ineptitude the spirit of vengeance. The further great misfortune of a man of letters is that ordinarily he is unattached. A bourgeois buys himself a small position, and there he is backed by his colleagues. If he suffers an injustice, he finds defenders at once. The man of letters is unsuccoured; he resembles a flying-fish; if he rises a little, the birds devour him; if he dives, the fish eat him.

Every public man pays tribute to malignity, but he is paid in honours and gold.



METAMORPHOSIS, METEMPSYCHOSIS

Is it not very natural that all the metamorphoses with which the world is covered should have made people imagine in the Orient, where everything has been imagined, that our souls passed from one body to another? An almost imperceptible speck becomes a worm, this worm becomes a butterfly; an acorn transforms itself into an oak; an egg into a bird; water becomes cloud and thunder; wood is changed into fire and ash; everything in nature appears, in fine, metamorphosed. Soon people attributed to souls, which were regarded as light figures, what they saw in more gross bodies. The idea of metempsychosis is perhaps the most ancient dogma of the known universe, and it still reigns in a large part of India and China.



MILTON, ON THE REPROACH OF PLAGIARISM AGAINST

Some people have accused Milton of having taken his poem from the tragedy of "The Banishment of Adam" by Grotius, and from the "Sarcotis" of the Jesuit Masenius, printed at Cologne in 1654 and in 1661, long before Milton gave his "Paradise Lost."

As regards Grotius, it was well enough known in England that Milton had carried into his epic English poem a few Latin verses from the tragedy of "Adam." It is in no wise to be a plagiarist to enrich one's language with the beauties of a foreign language. No one accused Euripides of plagiarism for having imitated in one of the choruses of "Iphigenia" the second book of the Iliad; on the contrary, people were very grateful to him for this imitation, which they regarded as a homage rendered to Homer on the Athenian stage.

Virgil never suffered a reproach for having happily imitated, in the AEneid, a hundred verses by the first of Greek poets.

Against Milton the accusation was pushed a little further. A Scot, Will Lauder by name, very attached to the memory of Charles I., whom Milton had insulted with the most uncouth animosity, thought himself entitled to dishonour the memory of this monarch's accuser. It was claimed that Milton was guilty of an infamous imposture in robbing Charles I. of the sad glory of being the author of the "Eikon Basilika," a book long dear to the royalists, and which Charles I., it was said, had composed in his prison to serve as consolation for his deplorable adversity.

Lauder, therefore, about the year of 1752, wanted to begin by proving that Milton was only a plagiarist, before proving that he had acted as a forger against the memory of the most unfortunate of kings; he procured some editions of the poem of the "Sarcotis." It seemed evident that Milton had imitated some passages of it, as he had imitated Grotius and Tasso.

But Lauder did not rest content there; he unearthed a bad translation in Latin verse of the "Paradise Lost" of the English poet; and joining several verses of this translation to those by Masenius, he thought thereby to render the accusation more grave, and Milton's shame more complete. It was in that, that he was badly deceived; his fraud was discovered. He wanted to make Milton pass for a forger, and he was himself convicted of forging. No one examined Masenius' poem of which at that time there were only a few copies in Europe. All England, convinced of the Scot's poor trick, asked no more about it. The accuser, confounded, was obliged to disavow his manoeuvre, and ask pardon for it.

Since then a new edition of Masenius was printed in 1757. The literary public was surprised at the large number of very beautiful verses with which the Sarcotis was sprinkled. It is in truth nothing but a long declamation of the schools on the fall of man: but the exordium, the invocation, the description of the garden of Eden, the portrait of Eve, that of the devil, are precisely the same as in Milton. Further, it is the same subject, the same plot, the same catastrophe. If the devil wishes, in Milton, to be revenged on man for the harm which God has done him, he has precisely the same plan in the work of the Jesuit Masenius; and he manifests it in verses worthy maybe of the century of Augustus. ("Sarcotis," I., 271 et seq.)

One finds in both Masenius and Milton little episodes, trifling digressions which are absolutely alike; both speak of Xerxes who covered the sea with his ships. Both speak in the same tone of the Tower of Babel; both give the same description of luxury, of pride, of avarice, of gluttony.

What most persuaded the generality of readers of Milton's plagiarism was the perfect resemblance of the beginning of the two poems. Many foreigners, after reading the exordium, had no doubt but that the rest of Milton's poem was taken from Masenius. It is a very great error and easy to recognize.

I do not think that the English poet imitated in all more than two hundred of the Jesuit of Cologne's verses; and I dare say that he imitated only what was worthy of being imitated. These two hundred verses are very beautiful; so are Milton's; and the total of Masenius' poem, despite these two hundred beautiful verses, is not worth anything at all.

Moliere took two whole scenes from the ridiculous comedy of the "Pedant Joue" by Cyrano de Bergerac. "These two scenes are good," he said as he was jesting with his friends. "They belong to me by right: I recover my property." After that anyone who treated the author of "Tartufe" and "Le Misanthrope" as a plagiarist would have been very badly received.

It is certain that generally Milton, in his "Paradise", has in imitating flown on his own wings; and it must be agreed that if he borrowed so many traits from Grotius and from the Jesuit of Cologne, they are blended in the crowd of original things which are his; in England he is always regarded as a very great poet.

It is true that he should have avowed having translated two hundred of a Jesuit's verses; but in his time, at the court of Charles II., people did not worry themselves with either the Jesuits, or Milton, or "Paradise Lost", or "Paradise Regained". All those things were either scoffed at, or unknown.



MOHAMMEDANS

I tell you again, ignorant imbeciles, whom other ignoramuses have made believe that the Mohammedan religion is voluptuous and sensual, there is not a word of truth in it; you have been deceived on this point as on so many others.

Canons, monks, vicars even, if a law were imposed on you not to eat or drink from four in the morning till ten at night, during the month of July, when Lent came at this period; if you were forbidden to play at any game of chance under pain of damnation; if wine were forbidden you under the same pain; if you had to make a pilgrimage into the burning desert; if it were enjoined on you to give at least two and a half per cent. of your income to the poor; if, accustomed to enjoy possession of eighteen women, the number were cut down suddenly by fourteen; honestly, would you dare call that religion sensual?

The Latin Christians have so many advantages over the Mussulmans, I do not say in the matter of war, but in the matter of doctrines; the Greek Christians have so beaten them latterly from 1769 to 1773, that it is not worth the trouble to indulge in unjust reproaches against Islam.

Try to retake from the Mohammedans all that they usurped; but it is easier to calumniate them.

I hate calumny so much that I do not want even to impute foolishness to the Turks, although I detest them as tyrants over women and enemies of the arts.

I do not know why the historian of the Lower Empire maintains that Mohammed speaks in his Koran of his journey into the sky: Mohammed does not say a word about it; we have proved it.

One must combat ceaselessly. When one has destroyed an error, there is always someone who resuscitates it.



MOUNTAIN

It is a very old, very universal fable that tells of the mountain which, having frightened all the countryside by its outcry that it was in labour, was hissed by all present when it brought into the world a mere mouse. The people in the pit were not philosophers. Those who hissed should have admired. It was as fine for the mountain to give birth to a mouse, as for the mouse to give birth to a mountain. A rock which produces a rat is a very prodigious thing; and never has the world seen anything approaching this miracle. All the globes of the universe could not call a fly into existence. Where the vulgar laugh, the philosopher admires; and he laughs where the vulgar open their big, stupid eyes in astonishment.



NAKEDNESS

Why should one lock up a man or a woman who walked stark naked in the street? and why is no one shocked by absolutely nude statues, by pictures of the Madonna and of Jesus that may be seen in some churches?

It is probably that the human species lived long without being clothed.

People unacquainted with clothing have been found in more than one island and in the American continent.

The most civilized hide the organs of generation with leaves, woven rushes, feathers.

Whence comes this form of modesty? is it the instinct for lighting desires by hiding what it gives pleasure to discover?

Is it really true that among slightly more civilized nations, such as the Jews and half-Jews, there have been entire sects who would not worship God save by stripping themselves of all their clothes? such were, it is said, the Adamites and the Abelians. They gathered quite naked to sing the praises of God: St. Epiphanius and St. Augustine say so. It is true that they were not contemporary, and that they were very far from these people's country. But at all events this madness is possible: it is not even more extraordinary, more mad than a hundred other madnesses which have been round the world one after the other.

We have said elsewhere that to-day even the Mohammedans still have saints who are madmen, and who go naked like monkeys. It is very possible that some fanatics thought it was better to present themselves to the Deity in the state in which He formed them, than in the disguise invented by man. It is possible that they showed everything out of piety. There are so few well-made persons of both sexes, that nakedness might have inspired chastity, or rather disgust, instead of increasing desire.

It is said particularly that the Abelians renounced marriage. If there were any fine lads and pretty lasses among them, they were at least comparable to St. Adhelme and to blessed Robert d'Arbrisselle, who slept with the prettiest persons, that their continence might triumph all the more.

But I avow that it would have been very comic to see a hundred Helens and Parises singing anthems, giving each other the kiss of peace, and making agapae.

All of which shows that there is no singularity, no extravagance, no superstition which has not passed through the heads of mankind. Happy the day when these superstitions do not trouble society and make of it a scene of disorder, hatred and fury! It is better without doubt to pray God stark naked, than to stain His altars and the public places with human blood.



NATURAL LAW

B: What is natural law?

A: The instinct which makes us feel justice.

B: What do you call just and unjust?

A: What appears such to the entire universe.

B: The universe is composed of many heads. It is said that in Lacedaemon were applauded thefts for which people in Athens were condemned to the mines.

A: Abuse of words, logomachy, equivocation; theft could not be committed at Sparta, when everything was common property. What you call "theft" was the punishment for avarice.

B: It was forbidden to marry one's sister in Rome. It was allowed among the Egyptians, the Athenians and even among the Jews, to marry one's sister on the father's side. It is but with regret that I cite that wretched little Jewish people, who should assuredly not serve as a rule for anyone, and who (putting religion aside) was never anything but a race of ignorant and fanatic brigands. But still, according to their books, the young Thamar, before being ravished by her brother Amnon, says to him:—"Nay, my brother, do not thou this folly, but speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee." (2 Samuel xiii. 12, 13.)

A: Conventional law all that, arbitrary customs, fashions that pass: the essential remains always. Show me a country where it was honourable to rob me of the fruit of my toil, to break one's promise, to lie in order to hurt, to calumniate, to assassinate, to poison, to be ungrateful towards a benefactor, to beat one's father and one's mother when they offer you food.

B: Have you forgotten that Jean-Jacques, one of the fathers of the modern Church, has said that "the first man who dared enclose and cultivate a piece of land" was the enemy "of the human race," that he should have been exterminated, and that "the fruits of the earth are for all, and that the land belongs to none"? Have we not already examined together this lovely proposition which is so useful to society (Discourse on Inequality, second part)?

A: Who is this Jean-Jacques? he is certainly not either John the Baptist, nor John the Evangelist, nor James the Greater, nor James the Less[19]; it must be some Hunnish wit who wrote that abominable impertinence or some poor joker bufo magro who wanted to laugh at what the entire world regards as most serious. For instead of going to spoil the land of a wise and industrious neighbour, he had only to imitate him; and every father of a family having followed this example, behold soon a very pretty village formed. The author of this passage seems to me a very unsociable animal.

B: You think then that by outraging and robbing the good man who has surrounded his garden and chicken-run with a live hedge, he has been wanting in respect towards the duties of natural law?

A: Yes, yes, once again, there is a natural law, and it does not consist either in doing harm to others, or in rejoicing thereat.

B: I imagine that man likes and does harm only for his own advantage. But so many people are led to look for their own interest in the misfortune of others, vengeance is so violent a passion, there are such disastrous examples of it; ambition, still more fatal, has inundated the world with so much blood, that when I retrace for myself the horrible picture, I am tempted to avow that man is a very devil. In vain have I in my heart the notion of justice and injustice; an Attila courted by St. Leo, a Phocas flattered by St. Gregory with the most cowardly baseness, an Alexander VI. sullied with so many incests, so many murders, so many poisonings, with whom the weak Louis XII., who is called "the good," makes the most infamous and intimate alliance; a Cromwell whose protection Cardinal Mazarin seeks, and for whom he drives out of France the heirs of Charles I., Louis XIV.'s first cousins, etc., etc.; a hundred like examples set my ideas in disorder, and I know no longer where I am.

A: Well, do storms stop our enjoyment of to-day's beautiful sun? Did the earthquake which destroyed half the city of Lisbon stop your making the voyage to Madrid very comfortably? If Attila was a brigand and Cardinal Mazarin a rogue, are there not princes and ministers who are honest people? Has it not been remarked that in the war of 1701, Louis XIV.'s council was composed of the most virtuous men? The Duc de Beauvilliers, the Marquis de Torci, the Marechal de Villars, Chamillart lastly who passed for being incapable, but never for dishonest. Does not the idea of justice subsist always? It is upon that idea that all laws are founded. The Greeks called them "daughters of heaven," which only means daughters of nature. Have you no laws in your country?

B: Yes, some good, some bad.

A: Where, if it was not in the notions of natural law, did you get the idea that every man has within himself when his mind is properly made? You must have obtained it there, or nowhere.

B: You are right, there is a natural law; but it is still more natural to many people to forget it.

A: It is natural also to be one-eyed, hump-backed, lame, deformed, unhealthy; but one prefers people who are well made and healthy.

B: Why are there so many one-eyed and deformed minds?

A: Peace! But go to the article on "Power."

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Jean=John: Jacques=James.



NATURE

DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHER AND NATURE

THE PHILOSOPHER:

Who are you, Nature? I live in you; for fifty years have I been seeking you, and I have not found you yet.

NATURE:

The ancient Egyptians, who lived, it is said, some twelve hundred years, made me the same reproach. They called me Isis; they put a great veil on my head, and they said that nobody could lift it.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

That is what makes me address myself to you. I have been able to measure some of your globes, know their paths, assign the laws of motion; but I have not been able to learn who you are.

Are you always active? are you always passive? did your elements arrange themselves, as water deposits itself on sand, oil on water, air on oil? have you a mind which directs all your operations, as councils are inspired as soon as they are assembled, although their members are sometimes ignoramuses? I pray you tell me the answer to your riddle.

NATURE:

I am the great everything. I know no more about it. I am not a mathematician; and everything is arranged in my world according to mathematical laws. Guess if you can how it is all done.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

Certainly, since your great everything does not know mathematics, and since all your laws are most profoundly geometrical, there must be an eternal geometer who directs you, a supreme intelligence who presides over your operations.

NATURE:

You are right; I am water, earth, fire, atmosphere, metal, mineral, stone, vegetable, animal. I feel indeed that there is in me an intelligence; you have an intelligence, you do not see it. I do not see mine either; I feel this invisible power; I cannot know it: why should you, who are but a small part of me, want to know what I do not know?

THE PHILOSOPHER:

We are curious. I want to know how being so crude in your mountains, in your deserts, in your seas, you appear nevertheless so industrious in your animals, in your vegetables?

NATURE:

My poor child do you want me to tell you the truth? It is that I have been given a name which does not suit me; my name is "Nature", and I am all art.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

That word upsets all my ideas. What! nature is only art?

NATURE:

Yes, without any doubt. Do you not know that there is an infinite art in those seas and those mountains that you find so crude? do you not know that all those waters gravitate towards the centre of the earth, and mount only by immutable laws; that those mountains which crown the earth are the immense reservoirs of the eternal snows which produce unceasingly those fountains, lakes and rivers without which my animal species and my vegetable species would perish? And as for what are called my animal kingdom, my vegetable kingdom and my mineral kingdom, you see here only three; learn that I have millions of kingdoms. But if you consider only the formation of an insect, of an ear of corn, of gold, of copper, everything will appear as marvels of art.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

It is true. The more I think about it, the more I see that you are only the art of I know not what most potent and industrious great being, who hides himself and who makes you appear. All reasoners since Thales, and probably long before him, have played at blind man's buff with you; they have said: "I have you!" and they had nothing. We all resemble Ixion; he thought he was kissing Juno, and all that he possessed was a cloud.

NATURE:

Since I am all that is, how can a being such as you, so small a part of myself, seize me? Be content, atoms my children, with seeing a few atoms that surround you, with drinking a few drops of my milk, with vegetating for a few moments on my breast, and with dying without having known your mother and your nurse.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

My dear mother, tell me something of why you exist, of why there is anything.

NATURE:

I will answer you as I have answered for so many centuries all those who have interrogated me about first principles: I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THEM.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

Would not non-existence be better than this multitude of existences made in order to be continually dissolved, this crowd of animals born and reproduced in order to devour others and to be devoured, this crowd of sentient beings formed for so many painful sensations, that other crowd of intelligences which so rarely hear reason. What is the good of all that, Nature?

NATURE:

Oh! go and ask Him who made me.



NECESSARY

OSMIN:

Do you not say that everything is necessary?

SELIM:

If everything were not necessary, it would follow that God had made useless things.

OSMIN:

That is to say that it was necessary to the divine nature to make all that it has made?

SELIM:

I think so, or at least I suspect it; there are people who think otherwise; I do not understand them; maybe they are right. I am afraid of disputes on this subject.

OSMIN:

It is also of another necessary that I want to talk to you.

SELIM:

What! of what is necessary to an honest man that he may live? of the misfortune to which one is reduced when one lacks the necessary?

OSMIN:

No; for what is necessary to one is not always necessary to the other: it is necessary for an Indian to have rice, for an Englishman to have meat; a fur is necessary to a Russian, and a gauzy stuff to an African; this man thinks that twelve coach-horses are necessary to him, that man limits himself to a pair of shoes, a third walks gaily barefoot: I want to talk to you of what is necessary to all men.

SELIM:

It seems to me that God has given all that is necessary to this species: eyes to see with, feet for walking, a mouth for eating, an oesophagus for swallowing, a stomach for digesting, a brain for reasoning, organs for producing one's fellow creature.

OSMIN:

How does it happen then that men are born lacking a part of these necessary things?

SELIM:

It is because the general laws of nature have brought about some accidents which have made monsters to be born; but generally man is provided with everything that is necessary to him in order to live in society.

OSMIN:

Are there notions common to all men which serve to make them live in society?

SELIM:

Yes. I have travelled with Paul Lucas, and wherever I went, I saw that people respected their father and their mother, that people believed themselves to be obliged to keep their promises, that people pitied oppressed innocents, that they hated persecution, that they regarded liberty of thought as a rule of nature, and the enemies of this liberty as enemies of the human race; those who think differently seemed to me badly organized creatures, monsters like those who are born without eyes and hands.

OSMIN:

Are these necessary things in all time and in all places?

SELIM:

Yes, if they were not they would not be necessary to the human species.

OSMIN:

So a belief which is new is not necessary to this species. Men could very well live in society and accomplish their duty to God, before believing that Mahomet had frequent interviews with the angel Gabriel.

SELIM:

Nothing is clearer; it would be ridiculous to think that man could not accomplish his duty to God before Mahomet came into the world; it was not at all necessary for the human species to believe in the Alcoran: the world went along before Mahomet just as it goes along to-day. If Mahometanism had been necessary to the world, it would have existed in all places; God who has given us all two eyes to see the sun, would have given us all an intelligence to see the truth of the Mussulman religion. This sect is therefore only like the positive laws that change according to time and place, like the fashions, like the opinions of the natural philosophers which follow one after the other.

The Mussulman sect could not be essentially necessary to mankind.

OSMIN:

But since it exists, God has permitted it?

SELIM:

Yes, as he permits the world to be filled with foolishness, error and calamity; that is not to say that men are all essentially made to be fools and miscreants. He permits that some men be eaten by snakes; but one cannot say—"God made man to be eaten by snakes."

OSMIN:

What do you mean when you say "God permits"? can nothing happen without His order? permit, will and do, are they not the same thing for Him?

SELIM:

He permits crime, but He does not commit it.

OSMIN:

Committing a crime is acting against divine justice, it is disobeying God. Well, God cannot disobey Himself, He cannot commit crime; but He has made man in such a way that man may commit many crimes: where does that come from?

SELIM:

There are people who know, but I do not; all that I know is that the Alcoran is ridiculous, although from time to time it has some tolerably good things; certainly the Alcoran was not at all necessary to man; I stick by that: I see clearly what is false, and I know very little that is true.

OSMIN:

I thought you would instruct me, and you teach me nothing.

SELIM:

Is it not a great deal to recognize people who deceive you, and the gross and dangerous errors which they retail to you?

OSMIN:

I should have ground for complaint against a doctor who showed me all the harmful plants, and who did not show me one salutary plant.

SELIM:

I am not a doctor, and you are not ill; but it seems to me I should be giving you a very good prescription if I said to you: "Put not your trust in all the inventions of charlatans, worship God, be an honest man, and believe that two and two make four."



NEW NOVELTIES

It seems that the first words of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," In nova fert animus, are the motto of the human race. Nobody is touched by the admirable spectacle of the sun which rises, or rather seems to rise, every day; everybody runs to see the smallest little meteor which appears for an instant in that accumulation of vapours, called the sky, that surround the earth.

An itinerant bookseller does not burden himself with a Virgil, with a Horace, but with a new book, even though it be detestable. He draws you aside and says to you: "Sir, do you want some books from Holland?"

From the beginning of the world women have complained of the fickleness that is imputed to them in favour of the first new object which presents itself, and whose novelty is often its only merit. Many ladies (it must be confessed, despite the infinite respect we have for them) have treated men as they complain they have themselves been treated; and the story of Gioconda is much older than Ariosto.

Perhaps this universal taste for novelty is one of nature's favours. People cry to us: "Be content with what you have, desire nothing that is beyond your estate, restrain your curiosity, tame your intellectual disquiet." These are very good maxims; but if we had always followed them, we should still be eating acorns, we should be sleeping in the open air, and we should not have had Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Poussin, Lebrun, Lemoine or Pigalle.



PHILOSOPHER

Philosopher, lover of wisdom, that is to say, of truth. All philosophers have had this dual character; there is not one in antiquity who has not given mankind examples of virtue and lessons in moral truths. They have all contrived to be deceived about natural philosophy; but natural philosophy is so little necessary for the conduct of life, that the philosophers had no need of it. It has taken centuries to learn a part of nature's laws. One day was sufficient for a wise man to learn the duties of man.

The philosopher is not enthusiastic; he does not set himself up as a prophet; he does not say that he is inspired by the gods. Thus I shall not put in the rank of philosophers either the ancient Zarathustra, or Hermes, or the ancient Orpheus, or any of those legislators of whom the nations of Chaldea, Persia, Syria, Egypt and Greece boasted. Those who styled themselves children of the gods were the fathers of imposture; and if they used lies for the teaching of truths, they were unworthy of teaching them; they were not philosophers; they were at best very prudent liars.

By what fatality, shameful maybe for the Western peoples, is it necessary to go to the far Orient to find a wise man who is simple, unostentatious, free from imposture, who taught men to live happily six hundred years before our vulgar era, at a time when the whole of the North was ignorant of the usage of letters, and when the Greeks were barely beginning to distinguish themselves by their wisdom?

This wise man is Confucius, who being legislator never wanted to deceive men. What more beautiful rule of conduct has ever been given since him in the whole world?

"Rule a state as you rule a family; one can only govern one's family well by setting the example.

"Virtue should be common to both husbandman and monarch.

"Apply thyself to the trouble of preventing crimes in order to lessen the trouble of punishing them.

"Under the good kings Yao and Xu the Chinese were good; under the bad kings Kie and Chu they were wicked.

"Do to others as to thyself.

"Love all men; but cherish honest people. Forget injuries, and never kindnesses.

"I have seen men incapable of study; I have never seen them incapable of virtue."

Let us admit that there is no legislator who has proclaimed truths more useful to the human race.

A host of Greek philosophers have since taught an equally pure moral philosophy. If they had limited themselves to their empty systems of natural philosophy, their names would be pronounced to-day in mockery only. If they are still respected, it is because they were just and that they taught men to be so.

One cannot read certain passages of Plato, and notably the admirable exordium of the laws of Zaleucus, without feeling in one's heart the love of honourable and generous actions. The Romans have their Cicero, who alone is worth perhaps all the philosophers of Greece. After him come men still more worthy of respect, but whom one almost despairs of imitating; Epictetus in bondage, the Antonines and the Julians on the throne.

Which is the citizen among us who would deprive himself, like Julian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius, of all the delicacies of our flabby and effeminate lives? who would sleep as they did on the ground? who would impose on himself their frugality? who, as they did, would march barefoot and bareheaded at the head of the armies, exposed now to the heat of the sun, now to the hoar-frost? who would command all their passions as they did? There are pious men among us; but where are the wise men? where are the resolute, just and tolerant souls?

There have been philosophers of the study in France; and all, except Montaigne, have been persecuted. It is, I think, the last degree of the malignity of our nature, to wish to oppress these very philosophers who would correct it.

I quite understand that the fanatics of one sect slaughter the enthusiasts of another sect, that the Franciscans hate the Dominicans, and that a bad artist intrigues to ruin one who surpasses him; but that the wise Charron should have been threatened with the loss of his life, that the learned and generous Ramus should have been assassinated, that Descartes should have been forced to flee to Holland to escape the fury of the ignorant, that Gassendi should have been obliged to withdraw several times to Digne, far from the calumnies of Paris; these things are a nation's eternal shame.



POWER, OMNIPOTENCE

I suppose that the man who reads this article is convinced that this world is formed with intelligence, and that a little astronomy and anatomy suffices to make this universal and supreme intelligence admired.

Can he know by himself if this intelligence is omnipotent, that is to say, infinitely powerful? Has he the least notion of the infinite, to understand what is an infinite power?

The celebrated historian philosopher, David Hume, says in "Particular Providence": "A weight of ten ounces is lifted in a balance by another weight; therefore this other weight is of more than ten ounces; but one can adduce no reason why it should weigh a hundred ounces."

One can say likewise: You recognize a supreme intelligence strong enough to form you, to preserve you for a limited time, to reward you, to punish you. Do you know enough of this power to demonstrate that it can do still more?

How can you prove by your reason that this being can do more than he has done?

The life of all animals is short. Could he make it longer?

All animals are the prey of each other: everything is born to be devoured. Could he form without destroying?

You do not know what nature is. You cannot therefore know if nature has not forced him to do only the things he has done.

This globe is only a vast field of destruction and carnage. Either the great Being has been able to make of it an eternal abode of delight for all sentient beings, or He has not been able. If He has been able and if He has not done so, fear to regard him as malevolent; but if He has not been able, fear not to look on Him as a very great power, circumscribed by nature in His limits.

Whether or no His power is infinite does not regard you. It is a matter of indifference to a subject whether his master possesses five hundred leagues of land or five thousand; he is subject neither more nor less.

Which would be the greater insult to this ineffable Being, to say: "He has made miserable men without being able to dispense with them, or He has made them for His pleasure?"

Many sects represent Him as cruel; others, for fear of admitting a wicked God, have the audacity to deny His existence. Is it not better to say that probably the necessity of His nature and the necessity of things have determined everything?

The world is the theatre of moral ill and physical ill; one is only too aware of it: and the "All is good" of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke and Pope, is only a witty paradox, a poor joke.

The two principles of Zarathustra and Manes, so carefully scrutinized by Bayle, are a still poorer joke. They are, as has been observed already, Moliere's two doctors, one of whom says to the other: "Grant me the emetic, and I will grant you the bleeding." Manichaeism is absurd; and that is why it has had so many supporters.

I admit that I have not been enlightened by all that Bayle says about the Manichaeans and the Paulicians. That is controversy; I would have preferred pure philosophy. Why discuss our mysteries beside Zarathustra's? As soon as you dare to treat of our mysteries, which need only faith and no reasoning, you open precipices for yourself.

The trash in our scholastic theology has nothing to do with the trash in Zarathustra's reveries.

Why debate original sin with Zarathustra? There was never any question of it save in St. Augustine's time. Neither Zarathustra nor any legislator of antiquity had ever heard speak of it.

If you dispute with Zarathustra, put under lock and key the old and the new Testaments which he did not know, and which one must revere without desiring to explain them.

What then should I have said to Zarathustra? My reason cannot admit two gods who fight, that is good only in a poem where Minerva quarrels with Mars. My feeble reason is much more content with a single great Being, whose essence was to make, and who has made all that nature has permitted Him, than it is satisfied with two great Beings, one of whom spoils the works of the other. Your bad principle Ahriman, has not been able to upset a single one of the astronomical and physical laws of the good principle Ormuzd; everything progresses in the heavens with the greatest regularity. Why should the wicked Ahriman have had power over this little globe of the world?

If I had been Ahriman, I should have attacked Ormuzd in his fine grand provinces of so many suns and stars. I should not have limited myself to making war on him in a little village.

There is much evil in this village: but whence have you the knowledge that this evil is not inevitable?

You are forced to admit an intelligence diffused over the universe; but (1) do you know, for instance, if this power reaches right to foreseeing the future? You have asserted it a thousand times; but you have never been able either to prove it, or to understand it. You cannot know how any being whatever sees what is not. Well, the future is not; therefore no being can see it. You are reduced to saying that He foresees it; but foreseeing is conjecturing. This is the opinion of the Socinians.

Well, a God who, according to you, conjectures, can be mistaken. In your system He is really mistaken; for if He had foreseen that His enemy would poison all His works here below, He would not have produced them; He would not have prepared for Himself the shame of being continually vanquished.

(2) Do I not do Him much more honour by saying that He has made everything by the necessity of His nature, than you do Him by raising an enemy who disfigures, who soils, who destroys all His works here below?

(3) It is not to have an unworthy idea of God to say that, having formed thousands of millions of worlds where death and evil do not dwell, it was necessary that evil and death should dwell in this world.

(4) It is not to disparage God to say that He could not form man without giving him self-esteem; that this self-esteem could not lead him without misguiding him almost always; that his passions are necessary, but that they are disastrous; that propagation cannot be executed without desire; that desire cannot animate man without quarrels; that these quarrels necessarily bring wars in their train, etc.

(5) When he sees part of the combinations of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and this globe pierced everywhere like a sieve, from which escape in crowds so many exhalations, what philosopher will be bold enough, what scholastic foolish enough to see clearly that nature could stop the effects of volcanoes, the inclemencies of the atmosphere, the violence of the winds, the plagues, and all the destructive scourges?

(6) One must be very powerful, very strong, very industrious, to have formed lions which devour bulls, and to have produced men who invent arms to kill at one blow, not only bulls and lions, but even each other. One must be very powerful to have caused to be born spiders which spin webs to catch flies; but that is not to be omnipotent, infinitely powerful.

(7) If the great Being had been infinitely powerful, there is no reason why He should not have made sentient animals infinitely happy; He has not done so, therefore He was not able.

(8) All the sects of the philosophers have stranded on the reef of moral and physical ill. It only remains to avow that God having acted for the best has not been able to act better.

(9) This necessity settles all the difficulties and finishes all the disputes. We have not the impudence to say—"All is good." We say—"All is the least bad that is possible."

(10) Why does a child often die in its mother's womb? Why is another who has had the misfortune to be born, reserved for torments as long as his life, terminated by a frightful death?