IX
SCIENCE
hat day we tramped as far as the Pont Neuf, my good master and I, where the recesses were covered with those trestles on which the second-hand booksellers expose a conglomeration of romances and books of devotion. There one may find at twopence apiece the complete Astrée and the Grand Cyrus, worn and thumbed by provincial readers, with the "Ointment for Burns," and divers works of the Jesuits. My good master was accustomed, in passing, to read some pages of these works, of which he made no purchase, being out of funds, and wisely keeping for the Petit Bacchus the sixpence he happened by a rare chance to have in his breeches' pocket. For the rest, he did not thirst to possess the good things of this world, and the best works did not make him envious so long as he could get acquainted with the noble passages in them, on which he expatiated afterwards with admirable wisdom. The trestles of the Pont Neuf pleased him in that the books were impregnated with the smell of frying from the near neighbourhood of the hot-potato sellers, and this great man inhaled at the same time the welcome fragrance of cooking and of science.
Adjusting his spectacles, he examined the display of a second-hand dealer with the contentment of a happy soul, to which all things are gracious, for all things gain a grace from their reflection in it.
"Tournebroche, my son," he said to me, "there are books to be found on the stall of this good man, fashioned in the days when printing was, so to speak, in its swaddling-clothes, and these books still suffer from the effects of the roughness of our forbears. I find a barbarous chronicle of Monstrelet, an author said to have been more frothy than a pot of mustard, and two or three lives of Ste. Marguerite, which the gossips of old put as a compress on their stomachs during the pains of childbirth. It would be inconceivable that men could be so idiotic as to write and to read similar absurdities, if our holy religion did not teach us that they are born with a germ of imbecility. And as the light of faith has never failed me, not even, happily, in the sins of the couch or of the table, I can more easily understand their past stupidity than their present intelligence, which, to speak frankly, appears to me illusory and deceptive, as it will seem to future generations, for man is in his essence a stupid animal, and the progress of his mind is but the empty consequence of his restlessness. That is the reason, my son, that I mistrust what they call science and philosophy, which are, to my mind, but an abuse of visions, and fallacious figures, and, in a certain sense, the advantage gained by the evil spirit over the soul. You will understand that I am far from believing all the devilries with which popular credulity frightens itself. I think with the Fathers that temptation is within us, and that we are to ourselves our own demons and bedevilments. But I bear a grudge against Monsieur Descartes and against all the philosophers who, following his example, have searched for a rule of life and the principles of conduct in the knowledge of nature. For, after all, Tournebroche, my son, what is knowledge of nature if it be not a fantasy of the senses? And what does science add to it, I ask you, with its savants, from the time of Gassendi, who was no donkey, and Descartes and his disciples, down to that precious fool, Monsieur de Fontenelle? Large spectacles, my son, spectacles like those which sit on my nose. All the microscopes and telescopes which we make a show of, what are they but glasses a little clearer than these of mine, that I bought last year at the fair of St. Laurence, of which the glass for the left eye, the one I see the best with, was unhappily cracked this winter by a footstool flung at my head by the lame cutler, who fancied I was kissing Catherine the lace-maker, for he is a coarse man, and utterly obfuscated by his visions of carnal desires. Yes, Tournebroche, my son, what are these instruments with which the savants and the curious fill their galleries and their cabinets? What are spectacles, astrolabes, compasses, if not the means of helping the senses to keep their illusions, and to multiply our fatal ignorance of nature while we multiply our relations with her? The most learned among us differ merely from the ignorant by the faculty they acquire of amusing themselves with manifold and complicated errors. They see the world in a faceted topaz, instead of seeing it as does Madame, your mother, for instance, with the naked eye the good God has given her. But they do not alter their eyes in donning spectacles; they do not alter dimensions in using apparatus proper to the measurement of space; they do not alter the weight of things in using very sensitive scales. They discover new appearances merely, and are but the plaything of new illusions. That is all! If I were not convinced, my son, of the holy truths of our religion, there would be left to me in this conviction, which I hold, that all human knowledge is but a progress in phantasmagoria, nothing but to throw myself from this parapet into the Seine, which has seen many others drown since she began to flow, or to go and ask of Catherine that form of oblivion from the ills of this world which one finds in her arms, and for which it would be indecent for me to look, in my position, and above all, at my age. I should not know what to believe in the midst of all this apparatus, whose powerful deceptions would increase immeasurably the falsehood of my outlook and I should be an entirely miserable academician."
My good master was talking in this fashion before the first recess to the left, counting from the Rue Dauphine, and he was beginning to frighten the dealer who took him for an exorcist, when he suddenly picked up an old geometry, illustrated with sufficiently bad cuts by Sebastien Leclerc.[7]
"Perhaps," he said, "instead of drowning myself in love or in water, if I were not a Christian and a Catholic, I should decide to throw myself into the study of mathematics where the mind finds the aliment of which it is most in need, to wit: sequence and continuity. And I vow that this little book, quite ordinary as it is, gives me a certain good opinion of man's genius."
At these words he opened the treatise by Sebastien Leclerc so widely, at the section concerning triangles, that he nearly broke it clean in two. But soon he flung it down in disgust.
"Alas," he murmured, "numbers depend on time, lines on space, and these again are but human illusions. Without man there is neither mathematics nor geometry, and it is, after all, but a form of knowledge which does not draw us out of ourselves, although it affects an air of quite magnificent independence."
Having spoken, he turned his back on the relieved bookstall-keeper, and drew a long breath.
"Ah! Tournebroche, my son," he continued, "you see me suffering from an ill that I have brought on myself, and burnt with the fiery tunic with which I have been at such pains to clothe and deck myself."
He spoke thus in a fanciful fashion, being in reality clad in a shocking old overcoat generally held together by two or three buttons which, moreover, were not even fastened in their own button-holes, and, as he was accustomed to say laughingly, when one spoke to him of it, it was an adulterous connection, a presentation of city manners!
He spoke with warmth:
"I hate science," said he, "for having loved it too much, after the manner of voluptuaries who reproach women with not having come up to the dream they formed of them. I wanted to know everything, and I suffer to-day for my culpable folly. Happy," added he, "oh! very happy are those good people assembled round that vendor of quack medicines."
And he pointed with his hand to the lackeys, the chambermaids, and the porters of St. Nicolas, forming a circle round a practitioner who was giving a demonstration with his attendant.
"Look, Tournebroche," said he, "they laugh heartily when that funny fellow kicks the other man's behind. And in truth it is a pleasant sight, quite spoilt for me by thinking about it, for when one looks for the essence of this foot and the rest of it, one laughs no more. I ought, being a Christian, to have recognised earlier the malignity of that heathen saying, 'Happy is he who knows the cause of things.' I ought to have shut myself in holy ignorance as in an enclosed garden, and remained as the little children. I should not truly have been amused with the coarse play of this Mondor (this Molière of the Pont Neuf would have had little attraction for me when his prototype already appears to me too scurrilous[8]), but I should have found pleasure in the plants of my garden, I should have praised God in the flowers and fruit of my apple-trees.
"An immoderate curiosity has led me astray my son; I have lost, in the intercourse with books and learned men, the peace of heart, holy simplicity, and that purity of the simple-minded, all the more admirable in that it falters neither in the tavern nor in the hovel; as may be seen in the example of the lame cutler, and, if I dare say so, in that of your father, the cook, who retains much innocence though drunken and debauched. But it is not thus with him who has studied books. They leave, eternally, a bitter superiority, and a proud sadness."
Talking thus, his speech was cut off by the roll of drums.