VOYAGES TO THE MOON AND THE SUN

By CYRANO DE BERGERAC

Translated by
RICHARD ALDINGTON

With an Introduction and Notes

LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE EDINBURGH PRESS, 9 AND 11 YOUNG STREET, EDINBURGH

Broadway Translations

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety."

À Frédéric Lachèvre

TÉMOINAGE D'ADMIRATION ET DE RECONNAISSANCE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

I

THE LEGEND OF CYRANO

The legend of Cyrano de Bergerac began, one might say, during his life; but it was strongly founded by his friend Henry Le Bret who edited The Voyage to the Moon with an introduction, in 1657, two years after Cyrano's death. The 'Préface' of Le Bret is one of the chief sources of information about Cyrano. It is no discredit to Le Bret that he drew as favourable a portrait of his friend as he could, but we cannot accept literally everything he says and we are forced to read between the lines of his panegyric. Le Bret is largely responsible for the moral legend of Cyrano. He says:

"In fine, Reader, he always passed for a man of singular rare wit; to which he added such good fortune on the side of the senses that he always controlled them as he willed; in so much that he rarely drank wine because (said he) excess of drink brutalizes, and as much care is needed with it as with arsenic (with this he was wont to compare it) for everything is to be feared from this poison, whatever care is used; even if nothing were to be dreaded but what the vulgar call qui pro quo, which makes it always dangerous. He was no less moderate in his eating, from which he banished ragoûts as much as he could in the belief that the simplest and least complicated living is the best; which he supported by the example of modern men, who live so short a time compared with those of the earliest ages, who appear to have lived so long because of the simplicity of their food.

"He added to these two qualities so great a restraint towards the fair sex that it may be said he never departed from the respect owed it by ours; and with all this he had so great an aversion from self-interest that he could never imagine what it was to possess private property, his own belonging less to him than to such of his acquaintance as needed it. And so Heaven, which is not unmindful, willed that among the large number of friends he had during his life some should love him until death and a few even beyond death."[1]

It will be seen later that many of these virtues were probably necessities arising from an unheroic cause; but this moral character given by Le Bret was very useful to the 19th-century builders of the Cyrano legend.

Other 17th-century writers give a very different impression of Cyrano de Bergerac: where Le Bret saw a noble, almost austere genius, they went to the opposite extreme and saw a madman. An anecdote in the Historiettes of Tallemant des Réaux gives us another Cyrano:

"A madman named Cyrano wrote a play called The Death of Agrippina where Sejanus says horrible things against the Gods. The play was pure balderdash (un vray galimathias).[2] Sercy, who published it, told Boisrobert that he sold out the edition in a twinkling. 'You surprise me', said Boisrobert. 'Ah, Monsieur', replied the bookseller, 'it has such splendid impieties'."[3]

The implication that the success of the play was due to its "impieties" is repeated in an anecdote of the Menagiana quoted by Lacroix, to the following effect: When the pious people heard there were impieties in The Death of Agrippina, they went prepared to hiss it; they passed over in silence all the tirades against the Gods which had caused the rumour, but when Sejanus said:

"Frappons, voilà l'hostie",[4]

they interrupted the actor with whistling, booing and shouts of:

"Ah! the rascal! Ah! The atheist! Hear how he speaks of the holy sacrament!"

I cannot find this anecdote in my own copy of the Menagiana, but since my edition is 1693 and Lacroix quotes that of 1715, I presume his is an addition. In my edition I find another anecdote of Cyrano which I give here both for its rarity and because it shows 17th-century contempt for Cyrano at its most virulent:

"What wretched works are those of Cyrano de Bergerac! He studied at the Collège de Beauvais in the time of Principal Grangier. They say he was still in his 'rhetoric' when he wrote The Pedant Outwitted against his head-master. There are a few passable things in this play but all the rest is very flat. When he wrote his Voyage to the Moon I think he had one quarter of the moon in his head. The first public sign he gave of his madness was to go to mass in the morning in trunk hose and a night cap without his doublet. He had not one sou when he fell ill of the disease from which he died and if M. de Sainte-Marthe had not charitably supplied all his necessities he would have died in the poor-house."[5]

More 17th-century anecdotes of Cyrano will be found in the Life; those cited will at least show the early tendency to attach anecdotes to him and the curious conflict of contemporary opinion. During the second half of the 17th century Cyrano remained popular and his works were frequently reprinted. The 18th century saw a great decline in reputation and in editions; Voltaire repeated the accusation: "A madman!" No edition of Cyrano's works appeared in Paris between 1699 and 1855: the last of them before the revival of the 19th century was the Amsterdam edition of 1761. For a century there was no edition of Cyrano. He dropped out of sight almost entirely; but in the 19th century he was destined to be revived as an increasingly legendary figure, culminating in the heroic apotheosis of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.

Strangely enough the revival began in England in 1820 with an article in the Retrospective Review.[6] This article shows some acquaintance with Cyrano's originals as well as with the translation reviewed. The anonymous writer says:

"Cyrano de Bergerac is a marvellously strange writer—his character, too, was out of the common way. His chief passion appears to have been duelling; and, from the numerous affairs of honour in which he was concerned in a very short life and the bravery he displayed on those occasions, he acquired the cognomen of 'The Intrepid'. His friend Le Bret says he was engaged in no less than one hundred duels for his friends, and not one on his own account. Others however say, that, happening to have a nose somewhat awry, whoever was so unfortunate or so rash as to laugh at it, was sure to be called upon to answer its intrepid owner in the field. But however this may be, it is indisputable that Cyrano was a distinguished monomachist and a most eccentric writer."[7]

Seventeen years later that amiable man of letters, Charles Nodier, resuscitated Cyrano in his Bonaventure Desperiers et Cyrano de Bergerac. Before this Nodier had incidentally defended Cyrano in his Bibliographie des Fous:

"As to this book (The Voyage to the Moon), which he wrote when he was already mad (according to Voltaire), would you not be astonished if you were told that it contained more profound perceptions, more ingenious foresight, more anticipations in that science whose confused elements Descartes scarcely sorted out, than the large volume written by Voltaire under the supervision of the Marquis du Châtelet? Cyrano used his genius like a hot-head, but there is nothing in it which resembles a madman."[8]

Nodier is responsible for that portion of the Cyrano legend which makes him an innovator, plagiarized from, and persecuted to an early grave.

"It seems that a man who opened up so many paths to talent and who went so far in all the paths he opened, ought to have left a name in any literature....

"There was once a wooden horse which bore in its flanks all the conquerors of Ilion, yet had no part in the triumph. This begins like a fairy-tale ... and yet it is true.

"Poor wooden horse! Poor Cyrano!"[9]

But, if Charles Nodier carried on the legend, he did little more than open the way for Theophile Gautier, whose famous Grotesque is filled with every conceivable error of fact and yet is obviously one of Rostand's chief sources. Les Grotesques appeared in 1844 and contained ten pseudo-biographical sketches of "romantic" personalities in French literature chiefly of the 17th century. The book itself is an interesting by-product of the romantic movement, but here we are only concerned with the sixth sketch, Cyrano de Bergerac. This opens with a fantastic divagation upon noses, perhaps the most exaggerated development of the legendary Cyranesque appendage. If the reader will examine Cyrano's portraits, without prejudice and with particular attention to the nose, he will scarcely be prepared for this outburst:

"This incredible nose is settled in a three-quarter face [portrait], the smaller side of which it covers entirely; it forms in the middle a mountain which in my opinion must be the highest mountain in the world after the Himalayas; then it descends rapidly towards the mouth, which it largely obumbrates, like a tapir's snout or the rostrum of a bird of prey; at the extremity it is divided by a line very similar to, though more pronounced than, the furrow which cuts the cherry lip of Anne of Austria, the white queen with the long ivory hands. This makes two distinct noses in one face, which is more than custom allows, ... the portraits of Saint Vincent de Paul and the deacon Paris will show you the best characterized types of this sort of structure; but Cyrano's nose is less doughy, less puffy in contour; it has more bones and cartilage, more flats and high-lights, it is more heroic."

Cyrano de Bergerac.

We then learn that Cyrano was a wonderful duellist, that he revenged any insult to his nose with a challenge; after more disquisition on noses we read that Cyrano was "born in 1620, in the castle of Bergerac, in Périgord"[10], that he was unable to endure the pedantry of his schoolmaster and so that good country gentleman, his father, allowed him to go to Paris, where at eighteen he threw himself into fashionable life with the greatest success. Then comes a highly-coloured picture of the contrast between life in Paris in 1638 and the Bergerac family in their "tranquil and discreet house, sober and cold, well ordered and silent, almost always half-asleep in the shadow of its pallid walnut trees between the church and the cemetery." This is followed by a defence of Cyrano against the charge of atheism with a quotation from The Death of Agrippina. Next we hear that this Gascon gentleman joined the Gascon company of guards with Le Bret and of his numerous prowesses with the sword, and this slides into a description of Cyrano's early slashing style, with quotations from The Pedant Outwitted and the story of the actor whom Cyrano forbade to play. This is followed by several pages of excited panegyric, paraphrased from Le Bret; we get Cyrano's wounds, his love of study, his disinterestedness, his love of freedom and scorn of serving les grands, his subsequent service with the duc d'Arpajon, the falling timber on his head and his death; then we hear of his simple habits, his brilliant friendships and his study under Gassendi. The essay ends with several pages, dealing with Molière's famous plagiarism from The Pedant Outwitted and containing a most exaggerated account of Cyrano's writings, extremely loose in expression, showing that Gautier can have had but a superficial acquaintance with Cyrano's books.

If this essay of Gautier's were meant as biography and criticism, one can only say that it is likely to be misleading; if as fiction, that the form is not well chosen. Nevertheless, this and Nodier's article stimulated curiosity in Cyrano sufficiently to cause his works to be reprinted in 1855. Lacroix in 1858 issued another edition and wrote an enthusiastic preface (from the point of view of an ardent free-thinker), making Cyrano a great predecessor of the 18th-century philosophes and adding more legend.

After this, the legend of Cyrano smouldered for some forty years and then broke out in a final conflagration in 1897, with Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Everything picturesque which fancy and rumour had attached to the name of Cyrano during the centuries was taken up by Rostand, exaggerated, idealised almost to infinity—and the world believed, and doubtless still believes, that this is the "real" Cyrano de Bergerac. Strangely, Rostand apparently shared this illusion; for a French savant, M. Emile Magne, wrote a pamphlet pointing out some of Rostand's worst errors, and Rostand replied with a letter, claiming that his play was historically correct.

Rostand's play is a pleasing, if belated, specimen of the French romantic drama; its dramatic quality is undeniable, its appeal to the sentiments irresistible, its verse skilfully handled; it is characteristically, delightfully, absurdly French; it deserved its popularity. A man who cannot enjoy Rostand's Cyrano has taste too fastidious for his own good. But when he has watched the heroic lover of Roxanne fight his duels to the accompaniment of a ballade, promenade his huge nose about the stage, exhibit the remarkable delicacy of his sentiments and finally die a Gascon death—"mon Panache!"—this imaginary spectator must not tell us that this is "the real" Cyrano de Bergerac. It is an amusing Cyrano one would prefer not to lose; but Rostand's invention has nothing to do with the man who wrote the tragedy of The Death of Agrippina and The Voyages to the Sun and Moon; this is not the young man who enlisted in M. de Casteljaloux's company of guards; this is not the follower of Gassendi and Rohault; and this delicate lover is—alas!—not that Savinien de Cyrano, self-styled de Bergerac, who died miserably in the prime of his age not so much from the effects of the falling piece of timber as probably of venereal disease.

II

THE LIFE OF CYRANO DE BERGERAC

The family of Cyrano was not Gascon and was not noble. The first Cyrano of whom anything was known in France is Savinien I de Cyrano, of Sardinian origin, bourgeois of Paris and a merchant of fish. Doubtless the prejudice of noble birth is antiquated, yet when one has been brought up on Rostand's Cyrano the discovery is a shock, rather like finding that Sir Philip Sidney's grandfather was a London fishmonger. But this is only the first of the disagreeable surprises modern investigators prepare for us.

This Savinien, grandfather of the poet, became notary and 'secrétaire du Roy' in 1571. He was wealthy, he owned a large house in the rue des Prouvaires, various annuities, the fiefs of Boiboisseaux, Mauvières, and Bergerac, the last two bought in 1582. These purchases represent a familiar scene in the eternal social comedy of the rise and fall of families; the genuine old de Bergerac family had disappeared but their memory lingered on and no member of the Cyrano family ventured to call himself de Bergerac at Bergerac. Indeed the poet was the only member of the family who used the name either during the fifty-four years they possessed the fief or afterwards. In any case this Bergerac is not the Dordogne or Gascon Bergerac but a little estate not very far from Paris in the modern department of Seine et Oise.[11] So much for the noble Gascon of Gautier and Rostand.

This Savinien I de Cyrano married Anne Le Maire; their eldest son, Abel I de Cyrano, 'avocat au Parlement de Paris,' married Espérance Bellenger on the third of September 1612.[12] An inventory of their goods shows that Cyrano's father was an educated man who read Greek, Latin, and Italian. Abel de Cyrano had six children; the eldest surviving son was Savinien II, the poet, baptised on the sixth of March 1619 in Paris.

In 1622 Abel de Cyrano left Paris for his house at Mauvières, where young Savinien de Cyrano remained "until he was old enough to read". He was then sent to a small private school kept by a country parson, where he met his lifelong friend and posthumous panegyrist, Henry Le Bret. Savinien did not like his tutor; and this is not the first or the last time in history when there has existed a mutual hatred between a pert boy of talent and some plodding pedagogue. The boy complained so continually to his father that he was taken away from the parson and sent to the Collège de Beauvais in Paris.

These meagre details are all we know positively of Cyrano's childhood except that his godmother left him six hundred livres in 1628. How much of the rebelliousness of his temper in later years was due to hatred of this pedagogical parson is a matter of pure conjecture, but Cyrano's dislike of pedants and priests might plausibly be attributed at least in part to this man's clumsy usage. We may also surmise that access to his father's extensive library gave him that precocity for which he was remarkable, and that the years of childhood spent at Mauvières created in him a genuine love of nature. Numerous passages might be quoted from his writings to show that he really liked out-of-doors life, enjoyed the beauty of the country, and felt that kinship with wild living things—animals, birds, plants—which is supposed to be a wholly modern sentiment. This sentiment may be seen in the Letters, expressed with a good deal of affectation; but unmistakably in those pages of The Voyage to the Sun which describe the talking birds and trees.

The head-master of Beauvais was at that time Jean Grangier, described by some as an excellent pedagogue, by others as brutal, superstitious, violent, and vicious. Apparently he was one of those pedagogues who, in Ben Jonson's words, "swept their livings from the posteriors of little children"; and therefore was very unpopular with Cyrano, who made him the hero of The Pedant Outwitted. Flogging will always drive a sensitive and high-spirited boy to revolt; and when we find a truculent and sometimes offensive mood of revolt a main feature of Cyrano's work, we should remember before condemning him that a large portion of his childhood was passed under the birch of two bigoted pedants.

Cyrano left Beauvais in 1637, when he was eighteen. In the preceding year Abel de Cyrano had sold the fiefs of Mauvières, and Bergerac and had returned to Paris. This sale of land only fifty-four years after the purchase by the first Savinien de Cyrano shows how rapidly the affairs of the family declined financially. It would be interesting to know more of Cyrano's life in the period between his leaving school and joining the guards. Le Bret tells us that "at the age when nature is most easily corrupted", and when Cyrano "had liberty to do as he chose", he (Le Bret) stopped him "on a dangerous incline". It will easily be conjectured that the change from a flogging school to complete liberty in the Paris of 1637 would not incline a precocious youth to the monastic virtues. Many fantastic pictures of Paris under Louis XIII have been drawn by novelists and essayists; whether it were quite as picturesque as they make out may be doubted, but that its taverns were filled with riot, excitement and debauch is certain; and Cyrano frequented the taverns. The famous Pomme de Pin, the Croix de Lorraine, the Boisselière, the Pressoir d'Or, and a dozen other taverns were crowded with heterogeneous sets of courtiers, gentlemen, gossips, poets, atheists, duellists, rogues of all sorts, talking, laughing, drinking, writing, whoring, gambling and brawling. From Gaston d'Orléans, the King's brother, downwards, the greater part of the nobility, gentry and the learned at some time of their lives frequented these commodious taverns, rubbed shoulders with knaves and bawds and poets and held high carouse.

"Mordieu! comme il pleut là dehors!

Faisons pleuvoir dans nostre corps

Du vin, tu l'entens sans le dire,

Et c'est là le vray mot pour rire;

Chantons, rions, menons du bruit,

Beuvons ici toute la nuit,

Tant que demain la belle Aurore

Nous trouve tous à table encore."[13]

Into that society of revellers, unscrupulous, heedless, coarse, irreligious, but brave, witty, chivalrous, talented and merry, came a young man of eighteen, the owner of a curious nose "shaped like a parrot's beak", talented, witty and brave himself, already a brilliant swordsman, scatter-brained, vain with all the vanity of young men in Latin countries, eager for knowledge but filled with hatred for the theology and pedantry of his early masters. Imagine the London of James the First's reign so vividly and delightfully sketched in The Fortunes of Nigel, adding to it that freedom of speech, morals and speculation which Scott largely left out; transfer it to the turbulent Paris of 1637 and throw into that milieu not a sober Scotch laird, but a hot-headed young Frenchman. Is it not almost hypocritical to expect that he would do anything different from what he apparently did do: Drink, gamble, blaspheme, whore, talk atheism, play mad pranks and slit men's throats in duels?

From this wild cabaret life Cyrano was rescued by Le Bret just about the time when Abel de Cyrano threatened seriously to cut off supplies. At nineteen Cyrano entered the company of guards commanded by the "triple Gascon", M. de Carbon de Casteljaloux.

Cyrano de Bergerac was a good soldier, but that does not mean he was free from the ordinary vices of soldiers. If the "dangerous incline" from which Le Bret rescued his friend was gambling, he chose a curious remedy; for gambling is inevitably one means of dispelling the crushing ennui of military life. Another, almost universal, military amusement is drinking; one would not expect to find teetotallers among the Gascon guard. It seems probable that the "dangerous incline" was atheism or a serious love affair; for the military life is dulling to the affections and fatal to thought. Certainly, the mess and guard-room of M. de Carbon de Casteljaloux's company would not greatly differ from a noisy cabaret. One hardly sees what moral advantages were gained by the change, except that military discipline and comradeship probably steadied Cyrano if they failed to correct the extravagance of his character and behaviour. Casteljaloux's company consisted almost entirely of Gascons, and this fact has helped to propagate the myth of Cyrano's noble birth; and doubtless he assumed the Gascon-sounding name of de Bergerac to increase the illusion. But he must have possessed some other merit than that of an assumed name to enable him to enter the guards; this was of course his swordsmanship.

Duelling in France in the first half of the 17th century was more than a fashionable mania, it was a real danger to the state. The fashion was at its height in the reigns of Henry IV and Louis XIII. During eight years of the former reign no less than two thousand gentlemen lost their lives in duels. Even the great Cardinal Richelieu only succeeded in diminishing, not in crushing the habit. The duelling in Rostand's Cyrano is the most accurate part of the play; indeed it would be difficult to exaggerate the fantastic nature of these duels. Men fought for the merest trifles; not so much for honour as for the love of fighting, of prestige and notoriety. Successful duelling was then a sure means to those commonly desired ends. The thirst for "monomachy" was so ardent that the seconds were not content to regulate the combat but must needs take part in it; so that a girl's ribbon might be the pretext for six men to pull out their rapiers in mortal combat, with the result perhaps of several wounds and more than one death. Cyrano de Bergerac was a brilliant swordsman, a talent which gave him a position comparable to that of an aeroplane "ace" during the European war. The stories told of his duelling sound fabulous and are probably exaggerated, but certainly have a foundation in fact. Le Bret tells us:

"Duels, which at that time seemed the unique and most rapid means of becoming known, in a few days rendered him so famous that the Gascons, who composed nearly the whole company, considered him the demon of courage and credited him with as many duels as he had been with them days."

The most remarkable thing about these duels, and a point very much in Cyrano's favour, was that he fought over a hundred as second to other men and not on his own account. He was no Bobadil. Brun tries to argue that Cyrano must have fought on his own account, but even M. Lachèvre, who is hostile to Cyrano, denies it. Moreover, we have Cyrano's own declaration: "I have been everybody's second."

Casteljaloux's company was ordered for active service in 1639. The company was besieged in Mouzon by the Croats of the Imperial Army. Cyrano has described part of the siege in the twenty-fourth of his Lettres Diverses. The garrison was short of provisions and during one of the numerous sorties Cyrano was shot through the body. He had not recovered when the garrison was relieved by Chatillon on the twenty-first of June 1639. Next year Cyrano was again on active service. He was wounded a second time by a sword-thrust in the throat at the siege of Arras, sometime before the ninth of August 1640. He had served this campaign in Conti's gendarmes.

Two severe wounds in fourteen months are "cooling cards" even to a pseudo-Gascon. Cyrano determined to retire from the service.

"The hardships he suffered during these two sieges," says Le Bret, "the inconveniences resulting from two severe wounds, the frequent duels forced upon him by his reputation for courage and skill, which compelled him to act as second more than one hundred times (for he never had a quarrel on his own account), the small hope he had of preferment, from the lack of a patron, to whom his free genius was incapable of submitting, and finally his great love of learning, caused him to renounce the occupation of war which demands everything of a man and makes him as much an enemy of literature as literature makes him a lover of peace."

Cyrano, then, returned to his studies. Hitherto he had been unfortunate in his instructors, but he now made the acquaintance of several scholars and men of letters who had a strong influence on him, whose ideas he adopted and copied in his works. The celebrated Gassendi, who revived the philosophy of Epicurus and opposed both the Aristotelians and Descartes, came to Paris and lectured to a small number of selected students. Niceron makes the unlikely assertion that Cyrano forced his way into this learned society at the sword's point. It is certain that Cyrano sat at Gassendi's feet and picked up from his lectures those fragments of Epicurean physics he afterwards scattered through his works. There most probably he met Molière, Rohault, Bernier, Chapelle and the younger La Mothe Le Vayer. Cyrano was therefore a member of a distinguished literary group which contained one eminent philosopher and a dramatist of supreme genius.

Philosophy and the society of men of letters did not cause Cyrano to abandon his sword. Two documents are extant, dated October 1641, showing Cyrano's arrangements to take lessons in dancing and fencing. It is in these years 1641-43 that he began seriously to write and at the same time performed his most famous feats with the sword.

The battle of the Porte de Nesle, more authentic and even more heroic than the feats of Horatius celebrated by Lord Macaulay, has been related by every writer on Cyrano, from Le Bret to Rostand, from Gautier to M. Emile Magne. What happened, as far as one can make out, was this. A friend of Cyrano's, the Chevalier de Lignières, had been rash enough to banter the conjugal infelicities of a great lord who, sensible of the affront to his person and rank, hired a set of fellows to fall upon Lignières and to crop his ears in the public highway. Lignières heard of this, took refuge with Cyrano and remained with him until night, when they set out together for Lignières's home with Cyrano as escort and two officers of Conti's regiment as witnesses, in the rear. At the Porte de Nesle the bravi were ambushed to catch Lignières on his way to the Faubourg Saint-Germain; Le Bret says there were a hundred of them. In any event there was a crowd. Incredible as it seems, the fact is well attested that Cyrano attacked them all single-handed, killed two, wounded seven and put the rest to flight.[14]

The battle of Brioché's monkey is less creditable to Cyrano and far less authentic. The evidence is the unreliable one of an anonymous work, Combat de Cyrano de Bergerac avec le Singe de Brioché, au Bout du Pont-Neuf, almost certainly written by Dassoucy, a friend with whom Cyrano had quarrelled. Dassoucy fled to Italy when the pamphlet was published. The gist of the pamphlet is as follows:

One Brioché exhibited a marionette show near one end of the Pont-Neuf. Among the troup was a live monkey.

Cyrano came along, and some thirty or forty lackeys, waiting for the puppet show, began to hustle him and to make fun of his singular appearance; one of them actually flipped him on the end of his nose. Out came that deadly rapier in a flash, and the intrepid little "fiery whoreson," rushed at them, driving the whole mob of them before him. Brioché's monkey, "making a leg" for a sou, got in Cyrano's way and the gallant swordsman, not unnaturally mistaking it for one of the rabble, pierced it effectually with his rapier. Brioché brought an action against Cyrano to recover fifty pistoles damages.

"Bergerac defended himself like Bergerac, that is, with facetious writings and grotesque jokes. He told the judge he would pay Brioché like a poet, or 'with monkey's money' (i.e. laugh at him); that coins were an article of furniture unknown to Phœbus. He vowed he would immortalise the dead beast in an Apollonian epitaph."

It is possible that Dassoucy was merely parodying the battle of the Porte de Nesle; none of the facetious writings referred to is extant; but they may have perished with the elegy Le Bret saw Cyrano writing in the guard-room and the Story of the Spark and Cyrano's Lyric Poems.

The third anecdote attached to this period relates to the actor Mondory or Montfleury, the latter of whom is satirised in Cyrano's letter Against a Fat Man. The 1695 edition of the Menagiana gives the story as follows:

"Bergerac was a great sword-clanker. His nose, which was very ugly, was the cause of his killing at least ten people. He quarrelled with Montdory, the comedian, and strictly forbade him to appear on the stage. 'I forbid you to appear for a month', said he. Two days later Bergerac was at the play. Montdory appeared and began to act his part as usual; Bergerac shouted to him from the middle of the pit, with threats if he did not leave, and for fear of worse Montdory retired."[15]

The year 1645 in several respects opens a new phase in Cyrano's life. His mother was dead, he began to suffer from poverty—due to gambling it is said—and contracted a disease. There is a mystery about the death of Cyrano de Bergerac and the "maladie" which preceded it. M. Lachèvre has discovered a document showing the payment of four hundred livres to a barber-chirurgeon by Cyrano and, from circumstantial evidence we need not repeat, M. Lachèvre asserts that this was venereal disease. If so, the moral philosopher created by Le Bret disappears as completely as the delicate lover invented by Rostand.

It is a remarkable fact that Cyrano did not make a serious appearance in print until the year before his death, 1654. He wrote earlier and published prefaces and commendatory poems; he scribbled a few pamphlets and libels during the Fronde; but his reputation as a writer during his lifetime must have been based on the circulation of his writings in manuscript. The letters were not published until 1654, but they must have been written much earlier; The Pedant Outwitted does not seem to have been played, and The Voyage to the Moon was circulated in manuscript for some years before it was published.

The fact is we know very little about the last ten years of Cyrano's life. Abel de Cyrano died in January 1648 and the poet's share of the inheritance rescued him at least for a time from the poverty into which he had fallen. In February 1649 there appeared an anti-Mazarin pamphlet in verse, entitled Le Ministre d'Etat Flambé, signed D. B. This was followed by several prose pamphlets directed against Mazarin: Le Gazetier des Interressé, La Sybille Moderne ou l'Oracle du Temps, Le Conseiller fidèle. Some have denied that these were Cyrano's work; others are convinced to the contrary. If he did write them he soon changed his political opinions; for in 1651 he published his pro-Mazarin Contre les Frondeurs. One biographer thinks Cyrano was bribed by Mazarin to change his politics; another biographer thinks that since Cyrano undoubtedly wrote for Mazarin he could never have written against him.

There is a legend that about this time Cyrano visited England, but there is no confirmation of this.

Hitherto Cyrano had been too independent to enter the service of any nobleman. We have noticed his refusal of the offers made him by Marshal Gassion. Subjection to the whims of some wealthy person of note was a misery endured by many authors of the 17th century; Cyrano de Bergerac avoided it as long as he could, but about the end of 1652 he entered the service of the duc d'Arpajon. Saint-Simon in his usual contemptuous way calls this nobleman "Un bonhomme"; he was a good soldier, religious, vain and probably not very intelligent. Under his patronage Cyrano's works were printed in two handsome quartos in 1654. They contained The Death of Agrippina, The Pedant Outwitted, and The Letters. There was a dedication to the duke and a charming sonnet to his daughter. The success of these writings was considerable and their popular vogue lasted at least half a century.

The death of Cyrano de Bergerac is surrounded with mystery. He was only thirty-five when he died. Was this early death the result of a disease, as M. Lachèvre asserts; or was it, as other commentators say, the result of a blow on the head from a falling beam? If he were hit by a piece of timber, was this an accident, or was it revenge? Had Cyrano's very free philosophical speculations anything to do with it? It is impossible to answer these questions definitely; each commentator has replied to them according to his own prejudices.

The accident, if there were an accident, happened early in 1654. For some unknown reason Cyrano was turned out of the Hôtel d'Arpajon about this time. In June 1654 Cyrano was received into the house of M. des Bois Clairs, with whom he remained for fourteen months until a few days before his death. He then begged to be moved to a house at Sannois, belonging to his cousin Pierre de Cyrano, where he died on the 28th of July 1655. He was not buried in the convent of the Filles de la Croix as the reference books say (this was his brother Abel), but in the church of Sannois. He was converted to Christianity on his death-bed, presumably by his sister, who was a nun, and his friend Le Bret, the canon. A document is in existence stating that "Savinien de Cyrano, escuier, sieur de Bergerac," died a good Christian; it is dated the 28th of July 1655, and signed by the parish priest, who owned the curious name of Cochon. That Cyrano, like most of his contemporaries, yielded to a death-bed repentance is probably true; it is equally true that he spent most of his life as a free-thinker.

III

CYRANO'S FRIENDS

Among Cyrano's military friends were two senior officers, M. de Bourgogne (mestre de camp of the Prince de Conti's infantry) and Marshal Gassion. They of course would know him simply as a brave soldier in a company of dare-devils. More intimate soldier friends, of a rank approaching his own, were Cavoye, brother of the celebrated Cavoye killed at Lens; Hector de Brisailles, ensign in the Gendarmes de Son Altesse Royale; Saint Gilles, captain in the same regiment; Chasteaufort, whom Cyrano may have parodied in The Pedant Outwitted. He also knew Le Bret's brother, a captain in Conti's regiment; Duret de Montchenin and de Zeddé "braves de la plus haute classe", and de Chavagne.

Le Bret also mentions the Comte de Brienne, M. des Billettes, M. de Morlière.

The Comte de Brienne was the son of Louis XIII's minister; he was a secretary of state, then an Oratorian; and he died mad. Gilles Fileau des Billettes, brother of the Abbé de la Chaise, was "one of the most learned men of his day." Adrien de Morlière was a famous genealogist. Longueville-Gontier, also mentioned by Le Bret, was a "Conseiller au Parlement". Cyrano appears to have been friendly with the translator, Michel de Marolles, who has recorded in his Mémoires the fact that Cyrano sent him copies of The Death of Agrippina and The Voyage to the Moon.

After these respectable gentlemen we come to a more varied group of Cyrano's friends, most of whom are not mentioned by Le Bret, but who interest us more. Some of them were perhaps picked up in taverns; others he met in the course of his studies; others were congenial men of letters.

Three especially influenced Cyrano in his serious studies, particularly in philosophy and physics, and confirmed his natural tendency towards rationalism and scepticism by furnishing him with the knowledge and arguments he lacked. Chief among these was the celebrated Gassendi, who was born in 1592 and died in the same year as Cyrano, 1655. Gassendi was trained as an Aristotelian, but drew away from the school and followed with special interest the researches of Galileo and Kepler. He opposed Descartes. He is principally remembered for his revival of Epicurus, of the Epicurean physics and morals, and of Lucretius. Three translations of Lucretius were made as a result of his influence, one by Molière, one by Chapelle, one by Dehénault (all three friends of Cyrano) and, remarkably enough, all three of these translations have disappeared. Gassendi exerted a considerable influence over all the intellectual freethinkers of his age, and Cyrano de Bergerac was especially indebted to him. Gassendi's exposition of the Epicurean theory of atoms, his own ideas about "calor vitalis" and "anima mundi", will be found freely copied in The Voyages; while Gassendi's favourite principle "nihil in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu" made a deep impression upon Cyrano's mind.

Gassendi's lessons in physics were supported in Cyrano's memory by his friendship with Jacques Rohault (1620-75). Rohault was a mathematician, a pupil of Gassendi, but strongly influenced by Descartes. He wrote a treatise on physics which has so much in common with the fragments of Cyrano's treatise and the ideas expressed in The Voyages that at one time Rohault was supposed to have plagiarised from Cyrano. It is now almost conclusively proved that the opposite is true.

It is difficult to say what relations Cyrano had with the elder La Mothe Le Vayer (1583-1672). We know that he met his son at Gassendi's lectures. Old Le Vayer was a famous sceptic and in many ways a remarkable personality. Like many sceptics he lived to be immensely old, was highly respected for his erudition and, though he never seems to have been worried by the clergy, was the reverse of orthodox. His position in 17th-century Paris is interesting; he was one of the very few survivors of the great Humanist movement of the 16th century, and, as such, carried with him an air of enthusiasm, learning and freedom which must have been very stimulating in days when learning had been interrupted by civil disturbances and the stifling influence of the Catholic reaction was increasing.

A learned controversy has shaken a large amount of dust over the "problem" of Molière's relations with Cyrano. It has been denied that Molière studied under Gassendi, that he plagiarized two scenes from Cyrano's Comedy. It seems more probable that both are true.

Jean Dehénault (1611-1682), another literary friend of Cyrano's, was a melancholy sceptic, consistently unsuccessful in life; he wrote a certain amount of verse and a prose piece, which had the honour of being attributed to Saint-Evremond.

Bernier, Chapelle, Lignières, Dassoucy, Tristan l'Hermite, Royer de Prade were also among Cyrano's friends.

François Bernier (?-1688) became a doctor, travelled in the East and is remembered by his still readable Philosophie de Gassendi. Chapelle (1626-1686) wrote a Voyage in collaboration with Bachaumont and furnished Sainte-Beuve with material for a delightful Lundi. François Payot, Chevalier des Lignières (1628-1704), was chiefly concerned in the Porte de Nesle episode. He was a minor poet of the epigrammatic kind; Boileau called him "le poète idiot de Senlis." There is a book on him by M. Magne. Dassoucy was one of the innumerable burlesque poets of the time, for whom Cyrano wrote a preface and a madrigal; later they quarrelled and libelled each other. Tristan l'Hermite (1601-1655) was "an epicure of the cabarets, a hare-brained duellist, a gambler, a libertin, a beggar"; as a youth he was exiled for killing a man. Cyrano praises him as the greatest man of the age! Finally, Royer de Prade and Henry Le Bret were Cyrano's oldest and most faithful friends. Henry Le Bret was the son of Nicholas Le Bret; born 1617; soldier, lawyer, then priest; canon in 1659. He lived to be ninety-three. De Prade was a historian and tragic poet, known to his friends as "le Corneille Tacite des Français". Cyrano wrote a preface to the 1650 edition of de Prade's works and the latter wrote a sonnet on The Voyage to the Moon.

IV

THE LIBERTIN QUESTION

To write of Cyrano de Bergerac and not to mention the "libertin question" is to shirk a difficulty. A "libertin" in French means a free-thinker in religion, generally but not necessarily, a man of free or even criminal morals. It is particularly applied to a whole mass of sceptical or at any rate non-Christian French writers of the 17th century. To draw an English parallel: Marlowe, Greene in his unregenerate days, Rochester, Sedley, even Wycherley and Hobbes would be libertins; but Hume and Gibbon would be philosophes.

The father of the libertins was Montaigne; great, adorable Montaigne, whose divine common-sense emerges from the churning floods of metaphysical quiddities and the gross clouds of popular errors like a glittering marble rock. Super hanc petram the French libertins founded their temple of incredulity, but from lack of unanimity the edifice remains incomplete. It is the habit of official commentators to insist upon the Stoic element in Montaigne. It is there, because Montaigne had absorbed the wisdom of the Ancients; but one might as legitimately insist upon the Epicurean or the Sceptical aspect of his book. That, at least, is what the libertins did. They took the sceptical wisdom of Montaigne and tempered it with the mirth of Rabelais. Sometimes the wisdom was not very apparent and the mirth was very Rabelaisian. Sometimes the mixture was happy. Molière was a libertin; so were Saint-Evremond and his friend Ninon de L'Enclos and the cardinal de Retz and Théophile and Saint-Amant and Boisrobert and Cyrano and Chapelle and scores more. The degree of "libertinism" runs from the mere sparkle and freedom from cant of Molière and the fastidiousness of Saint-Evremond to the brutal orgies of the "goinfres" and the criminality of Claude le Petit, who was burned for blasphemy, murder and sodomy. Cyrano began towards the brutal end and developed towards the gentler standard.

There are two current theories of libertinism. One is particularly espoused by M. Frédéric Lachèvre, the erudite editor of the Libertins, whose work is indispensable to a correct understanding of this period of French literature. This theory refuses the libertins coherence of thought or any real intellectual importance. It puts aside as "sceptiques" those writers whose polite manners and respectable morals make it difficult to disparage them, and concentrates upon those whose lives show dubious or even criminal episodes. From an immense mass of facts and skilfully arranged historical conjectures this critic argues that the libertins are not to be considered as honourable and talented men seeking truth, but as undisciplined egotists, lacking coherence of thought and seriousness of purpose; who attacked institutions from vanity, who cultivated sedition and irreligion because by proclaiming such ideas they became involved in that stir of publicity for which paltry vanity craves.

The other theory regards the libertins as expressing more or less coherently a great trend of thought in French intellectual life, as the heterodox tradition of France, as an exuberant product of the French critical spirit. This spirit shows itself not in works of formal criticism alone, but in a general temper of the mind, a disposition to examine institutions and ideas critically, a readiness to laugh at what had seemed terrible or oppressive, to jest down tyranny with a bawdy song; a spirit co-existent with French literature, already strong in the 13th century, when England intellectually was a mere Norman province. The chansons de geste and the tales of chivalry are parodied in satirical fabliaux; courteous love is mocked by innumerable voices; the crusades are barely over and the great cathedrals still unfinished when Rutebeuf writes:

"Papelart et Béguin

Ont le siècle honni."

We see a Louis IX set off by a Joinville—don Quixote and Sancho Panza 350 years before Cervantes. François Villon follows Charles d'Orléans; Rabelais is the contemporary of Calvin; Racine is followed by Voltaire. The précieux movement is followed by the burlesque; the hard thought of Voltaire by the softness of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre; the Romantics by the Naturalistes. The heterodox tradition from Le Roman de Renart (12th century) and the Fabliaux (13th century) can be traced throughout French literature to Anatole France and Remy de Gourmont. French literature is like a great double stream which constantly winds and branches out and reabsorbs side channels. We can see the 17th-century libertins as an episode in a great intellectual struggle and Cyrano de Bergerac as a minor, but not unimportant, actor, in that episode. In any case Cyrano is not an exception in French literature in spite of a few eccentricities; he is one example of a perfectly recognizable intellectual type and so far from being the complete "original" he is made out to be, he has little to offer which cannot be found in his contemporaries and immediate predecessors.[16]

V

THE WORKS OF CYRANO DE BERGERAC

The extant writings of Cyrano de Bergerac are: (1) A few poems, including the libel on Mazarin; (2) Three or four political pamphlets (doubtful); (3) Entretiens Pointus; a set of quibbling jokes; (4) Three sets of Letters; (5) A prose comedy, Le Pédant Joué; (6) A verse tragedy, La Mort d'Agrippine; (7) Les Estats et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil; (8) Traité de Physique, fragmentary.

The first three are unimportant. The best of Cyrano's few short poems is the sonnet to Jacqueline d'Arpajon. The political pamphlets interest the researcher and are not certainly Cyrano's. The Entretiens Pointus, or Merry Conceited Jests are verbal quibbles and jokes, supposedly memories of conversation in the Gassendi group.

With the letters we come to the first of Cyrano's works of literary value and are at once met with a difficulty which makes the study of Cyrano's work so troublesome. Whenever there exists a MS. of any of his writings the differences between this and all the printed editions before that of Gourmont (1908) is so considerable that in many cases the whole intention of the work is different. Most of the passages omitted in the printed editions are philosophical or satirical arguments or sarcasms directed against the Church and religion and were omitted in the 17th century for obvious reasons. No editions of Cyrano show the MSS. texts prior to 1908; the editions of Gourmont and particularly of Lachèvre have shown us a different Cyrano.

The Cyrano created by Gautier and Rostand was, of course, a chimera; but there was something curious in his work which gave some support to the theory that he was mad or at least very eccentric. He was not mad, he was simply heavily censored. Essential words, sentences, paragraphs, whole pages were omitted; always modifying the meaning, sometimes making it absurd.

These Letters belong to a confused period of French literature, a sort of interregnum between the age of Rabelais and Montaigne and the age of Louis XIV. The literary influences in Cyrano's time were the précieux, the satyriques and the burlesques. The letters of Guez de Balzac (1594-1654) and Voiture (1598-1648) made polite letter-writing fashionable. The libels of the Fronde, the satire of Regnier's disciples, the burlesque of Sorel and Scarron formed, in the first half of the century, the opposition to the Italianated schools of preciosity and politeness—Marini, the Scudérys, Voiture, the Rambouillet salon. Cyrano's Letters are a curious hotch-potch of these conflicting styles. These fifty odd letters are Amorous, Descriptive and Satirical, sometimes at the expense of real persons. Most of them are rhetorical exercises; a few are serious. Nothing could be more creditable to Cyrano than his letter Against Sorcerers. It is a vigorous and well-expressed protest against the stupid belief in sorcery, the grotesque legal proceedings and the barbarous sentences carried out upon nervously hallucinated or innocent people. It is a wonderfully just attack upon ignorance and superstition and contains his famous saying:

"Not the name of Aristotle (more learned than I), not that of Plato, nor that of Socrates, shall ever convince me if my judgment is not convinced by reason that what they say is true."

The Love-Letters are made of clever and wholly frigid conceits, which glitter and clink like chains of icicles; nothing could be farther from the language of genuine feeling. The Satirical Letters are abusive and filled with "clenches." They do not denounce types, they blackguard individuals. The Lettres Diverses are mostly descriptive pieces on themes like the seasons, a lady with red hair, a country house; written in the highly conceited vein then affected by Cyrano. Some of them are vigorous and well-expressed. They are well translated as to style by the anonymous person who published Bergerac's Satyrical Characters in 1658. The first edition of these Letters is dated 1654, but one of them was published as early as 1648; others may have been written earlier. They were probably rewritten before publication and were certainly censored.

Cyrano de Bergerac is the author of a comedy, Le Pédant Joué, written 1645, published 1654, probably never played; and of a tragedy, La Mort d'Agrippine, written in 1646, published 1654, played in 1653 or 1654 and revived for one performance on the 10th November 1872.

These plays alone would provide a theme for a very long essay; but here I must necessarily be brief.

Corneille, Racine, and Molière were not isolated literary phenomena without predecessors and contemporaries; any more than Shakespeare. There is a large pre-Corneille and pre-Molière drama.[17] Du Ryer, Rotrou, Gombaud, Scudéry, Hardy, Théophile de Viau, Boisrobert, are some of the best known dramatists of the thirties and forties of the seventeenth century. Among them was Cyrano de Bergerac. I cannot wholly share the contempt expressed by official French criticism for early French drama, though my acquaintance with it is superficial; I certainly cannot agree with the contemptuous estimates of Cyrano's plays. The fact that the plot of The Pedant Outwitted is taken from Lope de Vega seems very unimportant, when one considers the amazing gusto and energy Cyrano put into his uncouth comedy. Here his curious fustian style of ranting hyperbole serves him admirably; in The Pedant Outwitted bombast, exaggeration and caricature are carried to a superlative degree. Nothing could be more pedantic than Granger, the pedant, or more bombastic than the bragging poltroon, Chasteaufort. Some of the best scenes, situations and scraps of dialogue in The Pedant Outwitted have been appropriated by more famous dramatists, particularly by Molière. This may be seen in Le Dépit Amoureux, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and particularly in Les Fourberies de Scapin, where the whole of the famous "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère" scene is imitated from Cyrano.

The theme of the comedy is the outwitting of Granger by his son, Charlot. Both wish to marry Genevotte; Granger attempts to send his son away from Paris, and on various pretexts Charlot remains; by the device of a play within a play Charlot marries Genevotte before Granger's eyes. The whole is quite incredible, but amusing. The character Cyrano most enjoyed was Granger, a caricature of his old schoolmaster. It must be admitted that the long speeches of Granger and Chasteaufort, ingenious and fertile as they are, grow somewhat tedious in a play; all the characters, even the heroine, are infected with preciosity and burlesque. Extraordinary hyperbolical epithets are piled one upon another until the whole heap topples to absurdity; as for the rant of Chasteaufort, it leaves that of Tamburlaine a mild understatement; Bobadil and Bessus are realistic sketches in comparison with this. With all its faults the play is a remarkable piece of work and ought to interest anyone who likes Elizabethan drama.

The tragedy The Death of Agrippina provides us with another surprise. Whereas The Pedant Outwitted seems extremely archaic for 1645, The Death of Agrippina has been compared favourably with Corneille's minor tragedies. All the "precious" affectations of style, the recondite allusions which make The Pedant Outwitted a test of one's knowledge of old French, all the oddities, the quiddities, the "humours", disappear and we have a formal French tragedy written in good Alexandrines, moving according to the rules and containing a well-concerted action as well as good subsidiary scenes. Nothing could better illustrate the versatility of Cyrano's literary personality; the plays seem to have been written by two totally different persons. The subject of the tragedy is the conspiracy of Sejanus against Tiberius; Sejanus is in love with Agrippina, Livilla with Sejanus; Agrippina takes part in the conspiracy to avenge herself upon Tiberius with the hope of destroying Sejanus afterwards; the conspiracy is revealed by Livilla and both Sejanus and Agrippina lose their lives. There is one very fine scene at the end, where Sejanus is taunted by Agrippina; this contains the "horrible impieties" complained of by Tallemant; but why Sejanus should have talked like a Christian not even Cyrano's severest censurers have yet explained. The play is well-written and impressive.

Cyrano's fragmentary treatise on Physics needs only the remark that it is almost identical with Rohault's similar work and was either derived from it or from a common source. It was in part to popularize these studies and the sceptical ideas they inspired in him that Cyrano wrote his famous Voyages to the Moon and Sun, so often reprinted in France.

The Moon is supposed to have been written as early as 1648; The Sun was begun about 1650 and was left unfinished. Two versions of The Moon exist. One is contained in the MSS. of Paris and Munich and the other in the first edition, on the last of which all editions before Gourmont's incomplete reprint were founded. The MSS. undoubtedly contain the work as Cyrano wrote it and privily circulated it. The 1657 edition was heavily censored by Henry Le Bret, who was afraid to publish many passages reflecting upon the Church, of which he was a comfortably settled pillar. The early editions—and consequently all previous English translations—mark the places of some of these omissions with dots or the word "hiatus". The effect of this expurgation was in some cases to make nonsense; in most to destroy the point of Cyrano's sarcasm. Apart from merely variant readings and single words or phrases (which often, by the way, greatly alter the point of a passage), there are no less than fourteen out of a total of ninety-six pages in M. Lachèvre's edition omitted by Le Bret, and these are precisely the most daring and satirical parts of the whole work. The last four pages are different in MSS. and in the printed editions; I have given the MSS. These MSS. have only been recently available in France and have never before been translated into English. Thus, if the reader were familiar with Lovell's (1687) version and had also read the French Bibliothéque Elzivirienne or Garnier editions, he would yet find that about one-seventh of the matter given in this translation of The Moon would be new to him.

The MS. of The Sun has disappeared; were it ever discovered we should no doubt find that the printed editions had been mutilated, while if the lost Story of the Spark were recovered, we might find a still more daring satire on Christianity. The first printed edition of The Voyage to the Sun appeared in 1662.

These imaginary voyages are often described by French writers as 'Utopias'; they are no more Utopias than Pantagruel and Gulliver's Travels. They lack the political system of the Utopian romance, whose purpose is to recommend speciously some abominable form of tyranny under the pretext of making everybody happy. At different times I have read the Republic of Plato, the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, Campanella's Città del Sole, William Morris's News from Nowhere, and Hudson's A Crystal Age; and I am bound to say, with all reverence to these great men, that Morris's Nowhere sounded least unendurable, while the rest were nightmares, visions of meddlesome cranks. I have a deep reverence for Plato so far as I am able to comprehend him, but I think I would rather die than be enslaved by his ideal state.

Now, Cyrano de Bergerac had no intention of creating one of these ideally unpleasant tyrannies. His purpose was similar to that of Rabelais and Swift. He wanted to satirise existing institutions, humbugs and prejudices; he wanted to mock at a literal belief in the Old Testament; he wanted to hold up to odium the fundamental villainy of man; and he wanted to convey amusingly a number of quasi-scientific and philosophical ideas which it was highly dangerous then to publish and still more dangerous to try to popularise. Even then Cyrano dared not publish the book in his lifetime; and it was mutilated when it appeared after his death. The censorship of the ancien régime was almost exactly the antithesis to the police interference of to-day; great licence in morals and personalities was allowed, obscenities and even blasphemies were tolerated, but when an author, however eminent and serious, trenched upon the authority of the Church or the State, or offered new ideas which seemed likely to prove subversive, he was certain of persecution and punishment. Both systems have their defects. The tremendous hubbub raised against Tartuffe, the self-exile of Descartes,[18] the prosecution of Théophile de Viau, the outcry against Cyrano, the fact that Gassendi's Syntagma did not appear in print until after his death; all show the working of the ancient censorship and the prejudices it appealed to in the populace. One feels that many of the deplorable traits in Cyrano's character are the result of a deliberate and high-spirited revolt against what he thought was oppressive. He attacked the Church and war and paternal authority as fiercely and recklessly as he attacked the bravi at the Porte de Nesle.

Even in Cyrano's time there was nothing original in a fanciful voyage to the Moon. Brun quotes a formidable list of predecessors—most of whom one has never heard of—whose work Cyrano may or may not have known. All probably derive directly or indirectly from Lucian of Samosate. It is certain that Cyrano copied Rabelais, that he took whole paragraphs and many ideas from Sorel's Francion and several hints from Bishop Godwin's Man in the Moon. Campanella furnished him with numerous hints. The philosophic and quasi-scientific passages came from Descartes, Gassendi, and Rohault. Cyrano is a Gassendist in The Moon and a Cartesian towards the end of The Sun. To trace these in detail would be laborious; it is sufficient to say that the theory which made Cyrano the predecessor of Rohault is now wholly disproved, while those who have compared Cyrano with Gassendi and Rohault declare that the author of the Voyages advances little that cannot be found in their works. M. Juppont's endeavour to prove that Cyrano was a marvellous scientific genius anticipating modern discoveries will hardly bear investigation; to make his points he has to attribute to Cyrano ideas derived from others and to wrest his language from the scientific jargon of one period into the worse jargon of another. After translating the Voyages, which implies a certain familiarity with them, I conclude that when Cyrano attempts to be scientific he often fails to understand thoroughly what he is talking about. As soon as he begins to discourse of atoms, or attraction, or the magnet, his language becomes vague, involved and hesitating; he is metaphorical at the moment he should not be, and the thought obviously is not his own; the lack of clarity in his speech suggests that he failed to comprehend the ideas he pretends to expound, that he did not think them for himself but was indoctrinated with them by others. He makes use of the anacoluthon too often for a translator's comfort; for though the practice may be defended in poetry, sermons and other inspired works, it is unsuitable to the logical exposition of science. Finally, a certain lack of common-sense often precipitates him into absurdity; he chooses grotesque illustrations, wrecks ingenious ideas by some incongruity he might easily have avoided. It is significant that when great men like Molière and Swift have borrowed from Cyrano they improve on him chiefly by purging him of what is grotesque and absurd.

I must confess I view Cyrano's plagiarisms more coolly than recent French commentators; for Cyrano criticism has violently revolted from the theory that he was a perfect, beplumed hero, the most original man of his age, to the other extreme of a theory that he had no originality whatever, that he was affected, vain, debauched, dirty, hypocritical; ending up with a sort of Johnsonian "let us hear no more on't". Cyrano deserves some severity in the matter of plagiarism on account of his own stupid boast that he only read books to detect the plagiarisms of the authors. We are all plagiarists; every word we use is the creation of a poet; and a completely original author would probably be completely incomprehensible. This scientists' prejudice about priority of ideas is out of place in literature; we are engaged in creating a temper of the mind, in civilizing, not in riding an intellectual steeplechase. In works intended for amusement what matters plagiarism? Cyrano took an idea, say, from Sorel; Cyrano amuses us, Sorel bores us; are we not to read Cyrano because he plagiarized? And, in any event, these sarcasms of his which are merely amusing to-day were perilous matters then; if Cyrano had published an unexpurgated Moon in 1650, exile, imprisonment or some other torture might easily have been his lot. The ideas in the Voyages are derived indeed, but they were then new and worth circulating. Cyrano has been sneered at because, when he had written these dangerous matters, he evaded the possibility of martyrdom by refraining from publication; I confess I think he was wise; Naaman bowed himself in the house of Rimmon, and there is no obligation upon any man to sacrifice his life for his opinions.

Moreover, when we read an author whose purpose is "to instruct by entertaining" we care little for the origins of the instruction so long as the entertainment be there. Examined from this point of view the Voyages emerge very well. In spite of all their faults, real and alleged, they are entertaining. One would certainly rather spend an evening with Cyrano than with his enemy, Father Garasse, that terrific old bore, the "flail of the libertins". Moreover, the dullest passages in The Voyages are those he stole from his scientific friends and the most entertaining those he took from Rabelais or Godwin or Sorel or invented himself. By far the best part of The Voyages is contained in the early pages of The Sun, where Cyrano relates the persecutions and inconveniences supposed to arise from the publication of The Moon, together with his adventures with the police. The whole thing bustles along admirably, reminding one of the adventures of the boys in the Satyricon, and it is a dismal moment when Cyrano produces an "icosahedron mirror" and we know we are in for some more quasi-science. The satire on mankind in the story of the birds is very happy and furnished Tom d'Urfey with an opera. The talking trees are quite good until they get on to loadstones and iron filings and the poles and such trash.

A large part of the opening of The Moon is occupied with a parody of the Old Testament, which Cyrano and his friends probably found more amusing than we do. The influence of the burlesque school on Cyrano has been noticed. Travesties then were a kind of craze; Virgil, Ovid, all the classics were burlesqued. There was one book it was dangerous to parody and Cyrano with his usual impetuosity rushed into a burlesque of the Old Testament. Here indeed he may claim to have given Voltaire several hints for his wickedly witty Romans.

It is not my intention to discuss The Voyages at greater length. The reader has here the full text before him and will form his own opinion. He has in the introduction sufficient information to understand at least in outline the writer of the book and his work, the milieu in which it was produced, the intellectual movement which helped to create it and its historical position.

The text used for the translation is that printed by M. Lachèvre in his Œuvres Libertines de Cyrano de Bergerac, 2 vols., Champion, Paris, 1921. I wish to thank M. Lachèvre for the generosity with which he has allowed me to make use of his book and his kindness in answering my queries and supplying me with information. I am also indebted to the work of Brun, Gourmont, Perrens, Lacroix, Juppont, Magne and of course Cyrano's friend Le Bret. The only English work I have examined is an essay by Henry Morley, which should be read with great caution.

RICHARD ALDINGTON

Title-page to Lovell's expurgated translation.

VOYAGE TO THE MOON

The moon was full, the sky clear, and the clocks had just struck nine as I was returning with four of my friends from a house near Paris.[19] Our wit must have been sharpened on the cobbles of the road for it thrust home whichever way we turned it; distant as the moon was she could not escape it. The various thoughts provoked in us by the sight of that globe of saffron diverted us on the road and our eyes were filled by this great luminary. Now one of us likened her to a window in Heaven through which the glory of the blessed might be faintly seen; then another, inspired by ancient fables, imagined that Bacchus kept a tavern in Heaven and had hung out the Full Moon for his sign; then another vowed that it was the block where Diana set Apollo's ruffs; another exclaimed that it might well be the Sun himself who, having put off his rays at night, was watching through a hole what the world did when he was not there. For my part, said I, I am desirous to add my fancies to yours and without amusing myself with the witty notions you use to tickle time to make it run the faster, I think that the Moon is a world like this and that our world is their Moon. The company gratified me with a great shout of mirth.

"Perhaps in the same way", said I, "at this moment in the Moon they jest at some one who there maintains that this globe is a world."

But though I showed them that Pythagoras, Epicurus, Democritus and, in our own age, Copernicus and Kepler had been of this opinion, I did but cause them to strain their throats the more heartily.

This thought, whose boldness jumped with my humour, was strengthened by contradiction and sank so deep in me that all the rest of the way I was pregnant with a thousand definitions of the Moon of which I could not be delivered. By supporting this fantastic belief with serious reasoning I grew well-nigh persuaded of it. But hearken, reader, the miracle or accident used by Providence or Fortune to convince me of it:

I returned home and scarcely had I entered my room to rest after the journey when I found on my table an open book which I had not put there. I recognised it as mine, which made me ask my servant why he had taken it out of the book-case. I asked him but perfunctorily, for he was a fat Lorrainer, whose soul admitted of no exercises more noble than those of an oyster. He swore to me that either the Devil or I had put it there. For my own part I was sure I had not handled it for more than a year.

I glanced at it again; it was the works of Cardan[20]; and though I had no idea of reading it I fell, as if directed to it, precisely upon a story told by this philosopher. He says that, reading one evening by candle-light, he perceived two tall old men enter through the closed door of his room and after he had asked them many questions they told him they were inhabitants of the Moon; which said, they disappeared. I remained so amazed to see a book brought there by itself as well as at the time and the leaf at which I found it open that I took this whole train of events to be an inspiration of God urging me to make known to men that the Moon is a world.

"What!" quoth I to myself, "after I have talked of a matter this very day, a book, which is perhaps the only one in a world that treats of this subject, flies down from the shelf on to my table, becomes capable of reason to the extent of opening at the very page of so marvellous an adventure and thereby supplies meditations to my fancy and an object to my resolution. Doubtless", I continued, "the two old men who appeared to that great man are the same who have moved my book and opened it at this page to spare themselves the trouble of making me the harangue they made Cardan. But", I added, "how can I clear up this doubt if I do not go there? And why not?" I answered myself at once, "Prometheus of old went to Heaven to steal fire!"

These feverish outbursts were followed by the hope of making successfully such a voyage.

I shut myself up to achieve my purpose in a rather lonely country-house where, after I had flattered my fancy with several methods which might have borne me up there, I committed myself to the heavens in this manner:

I fastened all about me a number of little bottles filled with dew, and the heat of the Sun drawing them up carried me so high that at last I found myself above the loftiest clouds. But, since this attraction caused me to rise too rapidly and instead of my drawing nearer the Moon, as I desired, she seemed to me further off than when I started, I broke several of my bottles until I felt that my weight overbore the attraction and that I was falling towards the earth. My opinion was not wrong; for I reached ground sometime later when, calculating from the hour at which I had started, it ought to have been midnight. Yet I perceived that the Sun was then at the highest point above the horizon and that it was midday. I leave you to conjecture my surprise; indeed it was so great that not knowing how to explain this miracle I had the insolence to fancy that in compliment to my boldness God had a second time fixed the Sun in Heaven to light so glorious an enterprise. My astonishment increased when I found I did not recognise the country I was in, for it appeared to me that, having risen straight up, I ought to have landed in the place from which I had started. Encumbered as I was I approached a hut where I perceived some smoke and I was barely a pistol-shot from it when I found myself surrounded by a large number of savages. They appeared mightily surprised at meeting me; for I was the first, I think, they had ever seen dressed in bottles. And, to overthrow still more any explanation they might have given of this equipment, they saw that as I walked I scarcely touched the ground. They did not know that at the least movement I gave my body the heat of the midday sun-beams lifted me up with my dew; and if my bottles had been more numerous I should very likely have been carried into the air before their eyes. I tried to converse with them; but, as if terror had changed them into birds, in a twinkling they were lost to sight in the neighbouring woods. Nevertheless I caught one whose legs without doubt betrayed his intention. I asked him with much difficulty (for I was out of breath) how far it was from there to Paris, since when people went naked in France and why they fled from me in such terror. This man to whom I spoke was an old man, yellow as an olive, who cast himself at my knees, joined his hands above his head, opened his mouth and shut his eyes. He muttered for some time but as I could not perceive that he said anything I took his language for the hoarse babble of a dumb man.

Cyrano's first attempt.

Sometime afterwards I saw coming towards me a band of soldiers with drums beating and I noticed that two left the main body to reconnoitre me. When they were near enough to hear I asked them where I was.

"You are in France", replied they, "but who the Devil put you in this condition? How does it happen that we do not know you? Has the fleet arrived? Are you going to warn the Governor of it? Why have you divided your brandy into so many bottles?"

To all this I replied that the Devil had not put me in that condition; that they did not know me because they could not know all men; that I did not know there were ships on the Seine; that I had no information to give Monsieur de Montbazon[21] and that I was not carrying any brandy.

"Oh! Ho!" said they taking me by the arm, "you are pleased to be merry! The Governor will understand you!"

They carried me towards their main body as they spoke these words and I learned from them that I was indeed in France, but not in Europe, for I was in New France.

I was brought before the Viceroy, Monsieur de Montmagnie. He asked me my country, my name and my rank, and when I had satisfied him by relating the happy success of my voyage, whether he believed it or only feigned to believe it, he had the kindness to allot me a room in his house. I was happy to fall in with a man capable of lofty ideas, who was not scandalised when I said that the earth must have turned while I was above it, seeing that I had begun to rise two leagues from Paris and had fallen by an almost perpendicular line in Canada.

That evening just as I was going to bed he came into my room.

"I should not have interrupted your rest", said he, "had I not believed that a man who travels nine hundred leagues in half a day can easily do so without being weary. But you do not know", added he, "the merry dispute I have just had on your behalf with our Jesuit Fathers?[22] They are convinced that you are a magician and the greatest mercy you can obtain from them is to pass for no more than an impostor. And, after all, this movement you assign to the Earth is surely some neat paradox? The reason I am not of your opinion is that although you may have left Paris yesterday you could still have reached this country to-day without the Earth having turned. For the Sun, which bore you up by means of your bottles, must have drawn you hither since, according to Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe,[23] and modern philosophers it moves in a direction opposite to that in which you say the Earth moves. And then what probability have you for asserting that the Sun is motionless when we see it move, and that the Earth turns about its centre with such rapidity when we feel it firm beneath us?"

"Sir", replied I, "here are the reasons which oblige us to suppose so: First it is a matter of common sense to think that the Sun is placed in the centre of the Universe, since all bodies in Nature need this radical fire, which dwells in the heart of the Kingdom to be in a position to satisfy their necessities promptly; and that the cause of procreation should be placed in the midst of all bodies to act equally upon them: In the same way wise Nature placed the genitals in the centre of man, pips in the centre of apples, kernels in the centre of their fruit; and in the same way the onion shelters within a hundred surrounding skins the precious germ whence ten million others must draw their essence. The apple is a little universe by itself whose core, which is warmer than the other parts, is a Sun spreading about it the preserving heat of its globe; and the germ in the onion is the little Sun of that little world which heats and nourishes the vegetable salt of the mass. Granted this, I say that since the Earth needs the light, the heat and the influence of this great fire, she turns about it to receive equally in every part this strength which conserves her. For it would be as ridiculous to hold that this great luminous body turns about a point of no importance to it as to imagine when we see a roasted lark that it has been cooked by turning the hearth about it.[24] Otherwise, if the Sun were made to perform this labour it would seem that the doctor needs the patient, that the strong must yield to the weak, the great serve the small, and that instead of a ship coasting the shores of a country we must make the country move around the vessel. And if you find it hard to believe that so heavy a mass can move, tell me, I pray you, are the stars and the Heavens that you make so solid any lighter? And it is easy for us who are convinced of the roundness of the earth to deduce its movements from its shape; but why suppose the sky to be round since you cannot know it and since if, of all possible shapes it has not this shape, it certainly cannot move? I do not reproach you with your eccentrics, your concentrics and your epicycles,[25] all of which you can only explain very confusedly and from which my system is free. Let us speak only of the natural causes of this movement. On your side you are compelled to invoke the aid of intelligences to move and direct your globes! But without disturbing the tranquillity of the Sovereign Being, who doubtless created Nature quite perfect and whose wisdom completed it in such a way that by fitting it for one thing He has not rendered it unfit for another—I, on my part, find in the Earth herself the power which makes it move. I declare then that the sun-beams, together with the Sun's influence, striking upon the Earth in their motion, make it turn as we turn a globe by striking it with the hand, or that the vapours which continually evaporate from the Earth's bosom on that side where the Sun shines, are repulsed by the cold of the middle regions, rush back on the Earth and, of necessity being only able to strike it obliquely, make it dance in this fashion.

"The explanation of the two other movements is still less intricate. Consider I beg of you...."

At these words the Viceroy interrupted me.

"I prefer", he said, "to excuse you from that trouble (I have myself read several books of Gassendi on the subject) provided that you will listen to what I heard one day from one of our Fathers who shared your opinion. 'Truly', said he, 'I imagine that the Earth turns, not for the reasons alleged by Copernicus but because the fire of Hell (as we learn from Holy Scripture) being enclosed in the centre of the Earth, the damned souls, flying from the heat of the fire to avoid it, clamber upwards and thus make the Earth turn, as a dog makes a wheel turn when he runs round inside it.'"

We praised the good Father's zeal and, having finished the panegyric, the Viceroy said he greatly wondered the system of Ptolemy should be so generally received, considering how little probable it is.

"Sir", I replied, "most men judge only by their senses, are convinced only by their eyes; and just as a man in a ship sailing by the coast thinks himself stationary and the shore moving, so men, turning with the Earth around the sky, believe that the sky itself turns around them. Add to this the intolerable pride of human beings, who are convinced that Nature was made for them alone—as if it were probable that the Sun, a vast body four hundred and thirty-four times greater than the Earth,[26] should have been lighted only to ripen its medlars and to head its cabbages. For my part, far from yielding to their impertinence, I believe that the planets are worlds around the Sun and that the fixed stars are suns too with planets around them, that is to say, worlds, which we cannot see from here because they are too small and because their borrowed light cannot reach us. For, in good faith, how can we suppose that globes so spacious are only huge desert countries and that ours, because we grovel on it before a dozen proud-stomached rogues, should have been made to command them all? What! Because the Sun measures our days and our years, does that mean it was created only to save us from breaking our heads against the wall? No! If this visible God lightens man it is accidental, as the King's torch accidentally lightens a porter passing in the street."

"But", said he, "if, as you assert, the fixed stars are so many suns we may deduce thence that the universe is infinite since it is probable that the people in the worlds about a fixed star, which you take to be a sun, perceive above them other fixed stars which we cannot see from here and that it continues in this manner to infinity."[27]

"Doubt it not", replied I, "as God was able to make the soul immortal so could He make the World infinite, if it be true that Eternity is nothing else than duration without bounds and the infinite, space without limit. And then God Himself would be finite if we believe the world not to be infinite, since He could not be where there is nothing and since He could not increase the size of the World without adding something to His own extent, by beginning to be where He had not been formerly. We must believe then that as we see Saturn and Jupiter from here we should perceive, if we were in one or the other, many worlds we do not perceive from here and that the universe is constructed in this manner to infinity."

"Faith!" replied he, "you may well talk but I cannot comprehend infinity."

"Why, tell me," said I, "do you understand better the nothing which is beyond it? Not at all. When you think of this nothing you imagine at least something like wind, something like air, and that is something; but if you do not comprehend infinity as a general idea you may conceive it at least in parts, for it is not difficult to imagine beyond the earth, air and fire that we see, more air and more earth. Infinity is simply a texture without bounds. If you ask me how these worlds were made, seeing that Holy Scripture speaks only of one created by God, I reply that it speaks only of ours because this is the only world God took the trouble to make with His own hand and all the others, whether we see them or do not see them, hanging in the azure of the universe, are dross thrown off by the suns.[28] For how could these great fires continue if they were not united with matter to feed them? Well, just as fire casts off the ashes which choke it, just as gold in the crucible severs itself from the marcasite which lessens its purity, and just as our heart frees itself by vomiting from the indigestible humours which attack it; so the suns disgorge every day and purge themselves of the remnants of that matter which feeds their fire. But when these suns have altogether used up the matter which maintains them, you cannot doubt but that they will spread out on all sides to seek new fuel and will fall upon all the worlds they had thrown off before and particularly upon the nearest ones: Then these great fires again burning up all these bodies will again throw them off pell-mell on all sides as before, and being purified little by little they will begin to act as suns to these little worlds which they engender by casting them out of their spheres; doubtless it was this which made the disciples of Pythagoras predict an universal conflagration. This is not a ridiculous fancy; New France, where we are, produces a very convincing proof. This vast continent of America is one half of the Earth, and though our predecessors had sailed the ocean a thousand times they never discovered it. At that time it did not exist, any more than many islands, peninsulas and mountains which rise on our globe, until the rusts of the Sun being cleaned off and cast far away were condensed into balls heavy enough to be attracted towards the centre of our world, either little by little in small parts or perhaps suddenly in one mass. And this is not so unreasonable but that Saint Augustine would have applauded it had this country been discovered in his time, for this great personage whose genius was enlightened by the Holy Ghost asserts that in his time the Earth was as flat as an oven and that it swam upon the water like half of a cut orange; but if ever I have the honour to see you in France I will prove to you, by means of a very excellent perspective glass I have, that certain obscurities which from here seem to be spots are worlds in process of formation."

My eyes were closing as I said this, which obliged the Viceroy to bid me good-night. The next and following days we had conversations of the like nature; but since some time afterwards the press of business in the Province interrupted our philosophizing I fell back the more eagerly on my plan of reaching the Moon.

As soon as the Moon rose I went off among the woods meditating on the contrivance and issue of my undertaking. At length on Saint John's Eve when those in the fort were debating whether or no they would aid the savages of the country against the Iroquois, I went off by myself behind our house to the summit of a little hill, where I acted as follows.

With a machine I had constructed, which I thought would lift me as much as I wanted, I cast myself into the air from the top of a rock; but because I had taken my measures badly I was tumbled roughly into the valley. Injured as I was I returned to my room without being discouraged. I took beef-marrow and greased all my body with it, for I was bruised from head to foot; and after I had comforted my heart with a bottle of cordial I returned to look for my machine, which I did not find, seeing that certain soldiers who had been sent into the forest to cut wood for the purpose of building a Saint John's fire to be lighted that evening, had come upon it by chance and carried it to the fort. After several hypotheses of what it might be they discovered the device of the spring,[29] when some said they ought to bind around it a number of rockets because their rapid ascent would lift it high in the air, the spring would move its great wings and everyone would take the machine for a fire-dragon.

I sought it for a long time and at last I found it in the middle of the market-place of Quebec just as they were lighting it. The pain of seeing the work of my hands in such peril affected me so much that I rushed forward to grasp the arm of the soldier who was about to fire it. I seized his slow-match and cast myself furiously into the machine to break off the fire-works which surrounded it; but I came too late, for I had scarcely set my two feet in it when I was carried off into the clouds. The fearful horror that dismayed me did not so thoroughly overwhelm the faculties of my soul but that I could recollect afterwards all that happened to me at this moment. You must know then that the flame had no sooner consumed one line of rockets (for they had placed them in sixes by means of a fuse which ran along each half-dozen), when another set caught fire and then another, so that the blazing powder delayed my peril by increasing it. The rockets at length ceased through the exhaustion of material and, while I was thinking I should leave my head on the summit of a mountain, I felt (without my having stirred) my elevation continue; and my machine, taking leave of me, fell towards the Earth. This extraordinary adventure filled me with a joy so uncommon that in my delight at finding myself delivered from certain danger I was impudent enough to philosophize about it. I sought with my eyes and intelligence the reason for this miracle and I perceived that my flesh was still swollen and greasy with the marrow I had rubbed on it for the bruises caused by my fall. I knew that at the time the Moon was waning and that during this quarter she is wont to suck up the marrow of animals; she drank the marrow I had rubbed on myself with the more eagerness in that her globe was nearer me and that her strength was not weakened by any intervening clouds.[30]

When I had traversed, according to the calculation I have since made, more than three-quarters the distance which separates the Earth from the Moon, I suddenly turned a somersault without my having stumbled at all; in fact I should not have perceived it had I not felt my head burdened with the weight of my body. I realised then that I was not falling towards our world, for although I was between two Moons and could see very well that I drew further from the one as I approached the other, I was certain that the larger was our Earth since after a day or two of travelling the distant reflection of the Sun confounded the diversity of bodies and climates and therefore it appeared to me like a large gold platter, similar to the other. From this I supposed I was descending upon the Moon and I was confirmed in this opinion when I remembered that I had only begun to fall when I had passed three-quarters of the distance. For, said I to myself, the Moon's mass being less than ours the sphere of its activity must be less extended and consequently I felt the attraction of its centre more tardily.

After I had been long falling, as I supposed, for the violence of my fall prevented me from observing it, I remember no more than that I found myself under a tree, entangled with three or four rather large branches which I had snapped off in my fall and my face moistened with an apple which had been crushed against it.[31]

As you shall know very soon, this place was happily the Earthly Paradise and the tree I fell on precisely the Tree of Life. You may well suppose that without this miraculous chance I should have been dead a thousand times. I have often reflected since on the vulgar notion that a man who throws himself from a great height is suffocated before he reaches the ground; but from my adventure I conclude this to be false, or else this fruit's powerful juice trickling into my mouth must have recalled my soul which was yet near my warm corpse and ready to perform the functions of life. In fact as soon as I was on the ground my pain departed before it had even limned itself in my memory and I had but a slight recollection of having lost the hunger that had so tormented me during my voyage.

I got up and I had scarcely noticed the banks of the largest of the four great rivers, which there form a lake, when the spirit or invisible soul of the herbs which breathe out over that land delighted my nostrils. The little stones were neither hard nor rough except to the sight; they were soft when walked on.

I came first of all to a place where five avenues met and the oaks which formed them were so extremely tall that they appeared to support in the heavens a high garden-plot of greenery. Glancing from the root to the top and then from the summit to the foot I wondered whether the Earth bore them up or whether they themselves did not rather carry the Earth hanging from their roots. It seemed as if their heads, so proudly lifted, were bowed by force under the burden of the celestial globes and that they groaned as they supported this weight; their arms extended towards the sky seemed to embrace it and to ask from the stars the pure benignity of their influences which they receive before they lose any of their innocence in the bed of the elements. There, on all sides the flowers with no gardener but Nature exhale a wild breath which awakens and satisfies the sense of smell; there, the incarnate of a rose on the eglantine and the bright blue of a violet under the brambles leave no liberty of choice and make you think that each is more beautiful than the other; there, every season is spring; there, no poisonous plant grows but that its existence betrays its safety; there, the rivulets relate their journeys to the pebbles; there, a thousand little feathered voices make the forest ring with the sound of their songs and the flattering assembly of these melodious throats is so general that every leaf in the wood seems to have taken the tongue and form of a nightingale; Echo delights so much in their songs that to hear her repeat them one would think she wished to learn them by heart. Beside this wood two meadows are to be seen whose continuous happy green formed one emerald to the horizon. The confused mixture of colours which the Spring attaches to a hundred little flowers mingles the tints together and these waving flowers seem running to escape the caresses of the wind. This meadow looks like an ocean but, since it is a sea without shore, my eye, terrified at having wandered so far without discovering a limit, quickly sent my thought over it; and my thought wondering if it were not the end of the world would have convinced itself that so charming a scene had perhaps compelled Heaven to join itself to Earth. In the midst of this vast perfect carpet flow the silver bubbles of a rustic fountain whose banks are crowned with turf enamelled with daisies, buttercups and violets, and the crowding of these flowers all about appears as if each were thrusting forward to be the first reflected. The stream is still in its cradle, it is but just born and its young smooth face shows not one wrinkle; the large curves it makes, returning upon itself a thousand times, show how regretfully it leaves its native country, and, as if it had been ashamed to be caressed too near its mother, it repulsed murmuring the hand I put forth playfully to touch it; the animals that came there to drink, more reasonable than those of our world, showed their surprise at seeing it was full day above the horizon while yet they saw the Sun in the Antipodes and scarcely dared to lean over the brink lest they should fall into the firmament.[32]

I cannot choose but admit that the sight of so many fair objects tickled me with those agreeable pangs the embryo is said to feel when the soul is infused in it! My old hair fell out and was replaced by thicker and finer tresses; I felt my youth re-lighted, my face grow rosy, my natural heat mingle gently once more with my radical moisture; in fine, my age diminished some fourteen years.

I had walked half a league through a forest of jasmine and myrtles when I perceived something that moved, as it lay in the shade; it was a young man whose majestic beauty compelled me almost to adore him. He arose to restrain me.

"'Tis not to me", he exclaimed loudly, "but to God, that you owe these acts of submission!"

"You see me", I replied, "amazed with so many miracles that I know not how to begin the expression of my wonder. First I come from a world which you here no doubt take to be a Moon; and I thought to reach another, which the people of my country call the Moon, and I find myself in Paradise at the feet of a God who refuses to be adored, of a stranger who speaks my language."

"Except for the attribute of God", he replied, "what you say is true; this Earth is the Moon which you see from your Globe and the place where you walk is Paradise, but it is the Earthly Paradise into which only six people have ever entered: Adam, Eve, Enoch, Myself who am old Elijah, Saint John the Evangelist and you. You know very well how the two first were banished hence but you do not know how they came to your World. Know then that when they had both tasted the forbidden apple, Adam, fearful lest God should be further irritated by his presence and increase his punishment, considered the Moon, your Earth, as the sole refuge wherein he could shelter from the vengeance of his Creator. Well, at that time man's imagination was so strong, being not yet corrupted by debaucheries, by coarse foods or by the weakening of diseases, that when he was excited by a violent desire to reach this refuge his whole body became lightened through the fire of this enthusiasm and he was uplifted just as certain philosophers, whose imagination has been greatly moved by something, have been carried into the air by transports which you call ecstatic. Eve who was weaker and not so hot, because of the infirmity of her sex, doubtless would not have possessed an imagination able to conquer by the mere strength of its will the weight of matter, but since she had been but a little time made out of her husband's body the sympathy which still bound this portion to the original whole carried her after him as he went up, just as amber is followed by a straw, as the loadstone turns to the north from whence it has been torn. And Adam attracted this part of himself as the sea attracts the rivers which are made out of her. When they reached your Earth they took up their abode between Mesopotamia and Arabia; the Hebrews knew him by the name of Adam and the idolaters by the name of Prometheus, feigned by their poets to have stolen fire from Heaven, because the progeny he begot were endowed with a soul as perfect as that which God had filled him with; thus the first man left this world deserted to inhabit yours, but the All-Wise willed that so happy a dwelling-place should not remain uninhabited and a few centuries later he granted Enoch permission to leave the company of mankind, whose innocence had become corrupted. This holy personage considered that no retreat was secure against the ambition of his relatives (who were already cutting each other's throats for the possession of your world) except that happy land whereof Adam, his grandfather, had formerly talked so much. Yet how was he to get there? Jacob's Ladder was not yet invented! The grace of the Most High supplied the deficiency by causing Enoch to observe that the fire from Heaven descended upon the sacrifices of the just and of those who were acceptable before the face of the Lord, according to the word of His mouth: 'The savour of the just man's sacrifices has reached me.' One day when this divine flame was fiercely consuming a victim which he offered to the Eternal, he filled two large vessels with the vapour it gave off, sealed them hermetically and attached them under his arm-pits. The smoke immediately had a tendency to rise straight up to God and, not being able to penetrate the metal save by a miracle, bore the vessels upwards and in the same way carried with them this holy man.[33] When he reached the Moon and looked upon this fair garden an almost supernatural out-pouring of joy showed him that it was the Earthly Paradise wherein his grandfather had formerly dwelt. He promptly loosened the vessels which he had bound like wings on to his shoulders and did so with so much good fortune that he was scarce four toises in the air above the Moon when he took leave of his bladders. However he was sufficiently high up to have been sadly hurt had not the wind borne up the ample skirts of his robe.[34] The ardour of the fire of charity sustained him also. As to the vessels they continued to rise until God set them in the Heavens and they are what you to-day call the Balance, showing us every day that they are still full of the odours of a just man's sacrifice by the favourable influences they exert on the horoscope of Louis the Just, who had the Balance as his ascendant.

"Enoch nevertheless was not yet in this garden; he arrived there some time later. This was during the flood when the waters which engulfed your world rose to so prodigious a height that the Ark swam in the Heavens beside the Moon. The human beings within saw this globe through the window but the light reflected from this great opaque body was weakened because they were so near that they shared it and so each of them thought it was a part of the Earth not yet flooded. One daughter of Noah, named Achab, alone maintained tooth and nail that it was positively the Moon, perhaps because she had noticed they had approached this body as the ship rose. They pointed out to her that the sounding-line marked but fifteen fathoms of water; she only replied that the lead must have touched the back of a whale which they took for Earth and that for her part she was well assured it was the Moon in person they were about to board. In fine, since each one follows the opinion of his like, all the other women in turn grew convinced of it and in spite of the men's prohibition they launched the skiff on the water. Achab was the most daring and desired to be the first to affront the peril. She threw herself gaily into the boat and would have been followed by all those of her sex had not a wave separated her from the ship. They called to her, said she was a hundred times lunatic, vowed that through her every woman would one day be reproached for having a quarter of the Moon in her head—she did but flout them. There she was sailing outside the world. The animals followed her example, for most of the birds, impatient at the first prison that had ever restrained their liberty, flew thither if they felt their wings strong enough to risk the journey. The boldest of the quadrupeds even began to swim. More than a thousand got out before Noah's sons could shut the stables which were kept open by the crowd of animals rushing through. Most of them reached this new world. As for the skiff, it grounded upon a very pleasant hill where the courageous Achab landed. Delighted at having recognised that this Earth was indeed the Moon she was unwilling to embark again and join her brothers. She spent some time in a cave and one day as she was walking out, debating whether she were sorry or very glad to have lost the company of her relatives, she saw a man knocking down acorns. The joy of such a meeting made her fly to embrace him, and she received the like from him, for it was still longer since the old man had seen a human face. It was Enoch the Just. They lived together, begat posterity and had he not been obliged to withdraw into the woods by the original sin of his children and the pride of his wife, they would have passed the remainder of their days together with all the comfort God bestows as a blessing upon the marriage of the Just. There, every day in the wildest retreats of these terrible solitudes he offered up to God with a purified spirit his heart as a sacrifice. One day the Tree of Knowledge, which as you know is in this garden, dropped an apple in the river on whose bank it is planted and the fruit was carried out of Paradise by the waves to a place where poor Enoch was fishing to gain his scanty subsistence. This beautiful fruit was caught in his net and he ate it. Immediately he knew where the Earthly Paradise was and he came to live in it by secret means which you cannot conceive if you have not eaten, as he did, the Apple of Knowledge.

"Now I must tell you the manner in which I came here myself. You have not forgotten, I suppose, that my name is Elijah, for I told you so just now. You must know then that I was in your world and that I dwelt with Elisha, a Hebrew like myself, on the banks of the Jordan where I spent among books a life pleasant enough not to make me regret that it was continually passing away. However, as the enlightenment of my spirit increased, the knowledge of the enlightenment I did not possess increased also. Whenever our priests reminded me of Adam I could not forbear sighing at the recollection of that perfect Philosophy he had possessed. I despaired of being able to acquire it, when one day, after I had sacrificed to expiate the sins of my mortal Being, I fell asleep and the Angel of the Lord appeared to me in a dream. As soon as I awoke I failed not to labour at those things he had commanded me; I took of loadstone two square feet and cast it into a furnace, and when it was purged, precipitated and dissolved, I drew out the attractive principle, calcined the whole elixir and reduced it to the bulk of a medium-sized ball.

"Following upon these preparations I had made a very light chariot of iron and some months later, all my engines being completed, I entered my ingenious cart. Perhaps you will ask what was the use of this appliance? Know then that the Angel told me in my dream that if I desired to acquire the perfect knowledge I wished for I should rise from the world to the Moon, where I should find the Tree of Knowledge in Adam's Paradise and as soon as I had tasted its fruit my soul would perceive all the truths a created mind can perceive. For this voyage I had built my chariot. I got into it and when I was well and firmly seated in it I cast the loadstone ball high into the air. Now I had expressly made my iron machine thicker in the middle than at the ends and so it was lifted immediately in perfect equilibrium because it moved always more eagerly in that part. Thus, directly I arrived where the loadstone had drawn me I threw up the ball again in the air above me."

"But", I interrupted, "how did you throw the ball so straight above your chariot that it never went sideways?"

"I see nothing astounding in this adventure", said he, "for when the loadstone was cast into the air it attracted the iron straight to it and consequently it was impossible that I should rise sideways. I must tell you that I held the ball in my hand and continued to rise because the chariot rushed always towards the loadstone which I held above it; but the movement of the iron to join with the ball was so vigorous that it bent my body double and I dared not attempt the new experiment more than once. In truth it was a very surprising spectacle to behold, for I had polished the steel of this flying house carefully and it reflected on all sides the light of the Sun so keenly and sharply that I myself thought I was being carried away in a chariot of fire. At length after I had many times thrown the ball upwards and had flown after it, I arrived (as you did) at a place where I began to fall towards this world; and because at that moment I happened to be holding the loadstone ball tightly in my hands my chariot pressed against me to approach the body which attracted it and therefore did not leave me. All I had to fear now was breaking my neck, but to preserve myself from that I threw up the ball from time to time so that my machine, feeling itself attracted back, would rest and so break the force of my fall. Finally, when I was about two or three hundred toises above the ground I threw the ball out on either side level with the chariot, sometimes in the one direction and sometimes in the other, until my eyes discovered the Earthly Paradise. Immediately I failed not to throw my loadstone above it and, when the machine followed, I let myself fall until I saw I was about to be hurled against the ground; then I threw the ball upwards a foot only above my head and this little cast diminished altogether the speed I had acquired in falling so that my descent was no more violent than if I had jumped down my own height. I will not describe to you my amazement at the sight of the marvels which are here, because it was very similar to that which I perceive has just perturbed you.

"You must know, however, that the next day I came upon the Tree of Life, by whose means I prevented myself from growing old. Age very soon disappeared and the serpent went up in smoke."

At these words I said: "Venerable and holy Patriarch, I should be happy to know what you mean by this serpent which disappeared."

With a laughing face he replied thus: "I forgot, O my son, to reveal to you a secret which could not hitherto have been imparted to you. You must know then that after Eve and her husband had eaten the forbidden apple, God punished the serpent that had tempted them by confining it in man's body. Since then in punishment for the crime of the first father every human being who is born nourishes in his belly a serpent, the issue of the first one. You call this the bowels and think them necessary for the functions of life, but learn that they are nothing else than a serpent coiled upon itself in several folds. When you hear your guts rumble, it is the serpent that hisses and, according to that gluttonous nature with which he formerly incited the first man to eat too much, asks for food himself. God, to punish you, desired to make you mortal like other animals, and caused you to be possessed by this insatiable beast, to the intent that if you feed him too much you choke yourself or, if you refuse him his pittance when the starveling gnaws your stomach with his invisible teeth, then he rumbles, he rages, he pours out that venom which doctors call bile and so heats you with the poison he pours into your arteries that you are soon destroyed by it. Finally, to show you that your bowels are a serpent you have in your body, remember serpents were found in the graves of Æsculapius, Scipio, Alexander, Charles Martel and Edward of England, still feeding upon the corpses of their hosts."

"Truly", said I, interrupting him, "I have observed that since this serpent is always trying to escape from man's body his head and neck may be seen projecting from the lower part of our bellies. But God did not permit man alone to be tormented by it, he willed that it should rise up against woman to cast its venom upon her and that the swelling should last nine months after she had been bitten. And to prove to you that I speak according to the word of the Lord, He said to the serpent (to curse it) that though it might make woman fall by rising up against her, she would make it lower its head."

I would have continued these trifles but Elijah prevented me: "Remember", said he, "that this place is holy." He then remained silent some time as if to recollect the place in which he dwelt, and continued in these words: "I only taste the Fruit of Life every hundred years. The taste of its juice somewhat resembles spirits. I think it was the apple that Adam had eaten which caused our earliest forefathers to live so long, because something of its energy had flowed into their seed and was only extinguished in the waters of the flood.[35] The Tree of Knowledge is planted opposite. Its fruit is covered with a rind which produces ignorance in anyone who tastes it and preserves under the thickness of this peel the spiritual virtues of that learned food. After Adam was expelled from this blessed land God rubbed his gums with this peel, lest he should find the way back to it again. For more than fifteen years after this time he doted and forgot everything so completely that neither he nor his progeny down to Moses remembered the creation. But the remains of the power of this weighty peel were finally dissipated by the warmth and light of that great Prophet's genius. Happily I began on one of the apples which was so ripe it had shed its skin and my saliva had scarcely dampened it when universal Philosophy took me by the nose. It seemed to me that an infinite number of little eyes sank into my head and I knew at once how to converse with the Lord. Afterwards when I reflected upon this miraculous removal I felt that I could not have overcome merely through the occult virtues of a simple body the vigilance of the Seraph whom God placed on guard over this Paradise. But since it pleases Him to make use of secondary causes I thought He had inspired me with this means of entering it as He had made use of Adam's ribs to create a woman, although He could have formed her out of earth as well as the man.

"I remained for a long time in this garden walking without a companion. But at last, as the Angel at the Gate of the place was my principal host, I felt a desire to speak to him. An hour's walking ended my journey, for at the expiration of this time I reached a country where a thousand flashes of lightning confounding themselves into one formed a blinding daylight which served but to make darkness visible.

"I had not yet recovered from this adventure when I saw a fair young man before me. 'I am', said he, 'the Archangel you are seeking and I have just read in God that He had suggested to you the means of coming here and that He desires you to await His pleasure.' He conversed with me on several subjects and among other things told me that the light at which I had seemed frightened had nothing formidable about it, that it lighted up almost every evening when he was making his rounds because, in order to avoid the artifices of sorcerers, who enter everywhere without being seen, he was forced to indulge in broad sword play with his flaming brand all round the Earthly Paradise and that this light was caused by the flashing of his steel. 'Those which you perceive from your World', he added, 'are produced by me. If you see them sometimes afar off, that is because the clouds of a distant country, being disposed to receive this impression, reflect on to you these light images of fire, just as vapour differently placed is disposed to make a rainbow. I will not tell you any more, because the Apple of Knowledge is not far from here and as soon as you have eaten of it you will be as learned as I. But above all take care of this mistake; most of the fruits which hang on that plant are covered with a rind and if you taste it you will descend beneath Man, whereas the inner part will uplift you as high as the Angels.'"

Elijah had reached this point in the instructions the Angel had given him when a little man joined us. "This is the Enoch of whom I have spoken", whispered my guide. As he spoke, Enoch presented us with a basket filled with I know not what fruits, similar to pomegranates, which he had discovered that day in a retired grove. I put some of them in my pockets at Elijah's command, when Enoch asked who I was.

"'Tis an adventure which merits a longer conversation", answered my guide, "this evening when we go to bed he will tell us himself the miraculous details of his journey."

As he said this we reached a kind of hermitage made of palm branches ingeniously interwoven with myrtles and orange-trees. There I perceived in a little corner several heaps of a certain thread so white and so fine that it might have passed for the spirit of snow. I saw also spindles lying here and there. I asked my guide what they were used for and he replied, "To spin. When the good Enoch wishes to unbend from his meditations, sometimes he dresses the thread, and sometimes he weaves the linen which serves to make chemises for the eleven thousand virgins. You must have met sometimes in your world with something that floats through the air in the autumn about harvest-time. The peasants call it, 'Our Lady's cotton', but it is really the waste which Enoch clears off the linen as he makes it."

We went away without taking leave of Enoch, who lived in this hut, and we were obliged to depart from him so soon, because he prays every six hours, and that time had fully elapsed since his last orison.

As we went along I besought Elijah to conclude the story of the assumptions he had begun, and I told him that I thought he had broken off at the story of Saint John the Evangelist.

"Since you have not the patience", said he, "to wait until the Apple of Knowledge teaches you all these things far better than I can, I will tell you. Know then that God...."

At this word I know not how the Devil interfered, but I could not prevent myself from interrupting him waggishly:

"I remember", said I, "God was one day informed that the soul of this Evangelist was so detached that he only retained it by clenching his teeth. The Eternal Wisdom was mightily surprised at so unexpected an accident, exclaiming: 'Alas! He must not taste death. He is predestined to rise up to the Earthly Paradise in his flesh and bones. Yet the hour wherein I had foreseen he should be uplifted has almost expired! Just Heavens! What will men say of Me when they know I have been mistaken?' Thus to cover up His mistake the Eternal was constrained in His irresolution to cause him to be there without having the time to make him go there."

All the time I was speaking Elijah gazed at me with eyes that would have killed me had I been in a condition to die of anything but hunger.

"Abominable wretch!" said he, recoiling from me, "you have the impudence to banter holy things and assuredly it would not be with impunity if the All-Wise did not wish to leave you as a famous example of His pity to all nations. Hence, thou impious fellow, go from here, publish in this little world and in the other (for you are predestined to return there) the irreconcilable hatred of God to Atheists."

He had scarcely finished this imprecation when he seized hold of me and began to drag me roughly towards the gate. When we came near a large tree, whose branches were weighed almost to the ground by their burden of fruit, he said: "That is the Tree of Knowledge from which you would have drawn inconceivable enlightenment had you not been so irreligious."

He had not finished speaking when, pretending to faint with weakness, I stumbled against a branch from which I nimbly stole an apple. I had still several steps to make before I should get out of this delightful park but I was so violently attacked by hunger that I forgot I was in the hands of an angry prophet, pulled out one of the apples I had put in my pocket and thrust my teeth into it. But instead of taking one of those which Enoch had given to me, my hand fell on the apple I had picked from the Tree of Knowledge, which unfortunately I had not peeled.

I had scarcely tasted it when a thick night descended upon my soul; I did not see my apple any more nor Elijah beside me and my eyes did not recognise a single trace of the Earthly Paradise in the whole hemisphere, yet I did not cease to remember all that had happened to me there.

Afterwards, reflecting on this miracle, I supposed that the rind of this fruit did not wholly stupefy me, because my teeth went through it and felt a little of the inner juice, whose energy dispelled the malignities of the peel.

I was vastly surprised to find myself all alone in the midst of a land I did not know. I turned my eyes about me and gazed over the country, but no living thing presented itself to console me. At last I resolved to walk forward until Fortune brought me into the company of some creature or of death. She heard me favourably, for at the end of a half-quarter of an hour I met with two very large animals, one of which stayed before me while the other ran swiftly towards its den; at least I thought so, because a little time later I saw it return with more than seven or eight hundred of the same species, who surrounded me. When I could examine them near at hand I perceived that their body and face were like ours. This adventure made me remember the stories I had heard my nurse tell formerly about sirens, fauns and satyrs; from time to time they set up such furious shriekings, caused no doubt by their wonder at seeing me, that I almost thought I had become a monster.

One of these beast-men seized me by the neck, as wolves do when they carry off a sheep, cast me upon his back and took me to their town. I was greatly astounded when I saw that they were indeed men and yet every one I met walked on four legs. When the people saw me pass, seeing I was so small (for most of them are twelve cubits high) and that my body was supported by two feet only, they could not believe I was a man; for they hold that as Nature has given men two arms and two legs like the beasts, they ought to use them in the same way. And indeed, musing on this subject afterwards, I have thought that this position of the body was not so extravagant, for I recollected that our children walk on four feet when they are taught by Nature alone and only rise on two feet through the care of their nurses who set them in little carts and tie them with straps to prevent their falling on four feet, which is the only position wherein the shape of our body tends to repose.

At that time they said (according to the interpretation made to me afterwards) that I was certainly the female of the Queen's little animal. As this or as something else I was carried to the town hall, where I noticed from the buzz and the gestures made by the people and the magistrates that they were arguing together about what I might be. When they had talked together for a long time a certain citizen who kept rare beasts begged the aldermen to lend me to him until the Queen sent for me to live with my male. No objection was made. This mountebank took me to his home; he taught me to play the buffoon, to throw somersaults, to make grimaces and in the afternoon he took money at the door for showing me.[36]

At length Heaven, moved by my misfortunes and displeased to see the Temple of its Master profaned, willed that one day when I was tied to the end of a cord with which the mountebank made me leap to amuse the mob, one of those looking on gazed at me very attentively and at length asked me in Greek who I was. I was vastly surprised to hear him speak there as in our world. He questioned me for some time; I replied and told him afterwards in general terms what I had undertaken and the success of my voyage. He consoled me and I remember that he said: "Well, my son, you suffer the penalties of the failings of your world at last. Here, as there, exists a mob which cannot endure the thought of things to which it is not accustomed, but know that you receive a reciprocal treatment, for if someone from this earth should rise to yours and have the boldness to call himself a man, your learned men would have him smothered as a monster or as an ape possessed by a Devil." He promised me afterwards that he would inform the Court of my disaster; he added that as soon as he looked at me his heart told him I was a man, because he had formerly travelled to the world whence I came, that my country was the Moon, that I was a Gaul and that he had once lived in Greece, where he was called the Demon of Socrates and that after the death of this philosopher he had directed and instructed Epaminondas at Thebes; that afterwards he had passed over to the Romans, where Justice had attached him to the party of the younger Cato; then, that after his death he had devoted himself to Brutus; that since these great personages had left nothing behind them in the world but the phantom of their virtues, he retired with his companions sometimes to the temples, sometimes into solitude. "At last", he added, "the people of your world became so stupid and so gross that my companions and I lost all the pleasure we once had in teaching them. You must inevitably have heard us spoken of. They called us Oracles, Nymphs, Genii, Fairies, Hearth-gods, Lemures, Larvae, Lamias, Hobgoblins, Naiades, Incubi, Shades, Ghosts, Spectres, Phantoms. We left your World in the reign of Augustus a little after the time when I appeared to Drusus, the son of Livia, who was waging war in Germany, and forbade him to proceed further. It is not long since I returned thence for the second time. During the last hundred years I was instructed to travel there, I wandered about in Europe and conversed with persons whom you may have known. One day I appeared to Cardan as he was reading; I instructed him in many things and in recompense he promised me that he would bear witness to posterity that I was the person from whom he obtained knowledge of the miracles he proposed to write. I saw Agrippa, Abbot Tritheim, Doctor Faust, La Brosse, César[37] and a certain group of young men, known to the uninitiate by the name of Knights of the Rosy-Cross, to whom I imparted a number of artifices and natural secrets which no doubt will have caused the people to consider them great magicians. I knew Campanella[38] also. When he was in the inquisition at Rome it was I who advised him to conform his face and body to the usual grimaces and postures of those whose inner mind he needed to know, so that he might excite in himself by a similar position the thoughts which this same situation had called up in his adversaries; because he would treat better with their soul when he knew it. At my request he began a book, which we called De Sensu Rerum. Similarly in France I frequented La Mothe Le Vayer and Gassendi[39]: the second is a man who has written as much philosophy as the first has lived. I know there are numbers of other men whom your age considers divine, but I found nothing in them save a vast deal of chatter and pride.

"When I left your country for England to study the manners of its inhabitants I met a man who is the shame of his country; for certainly it is a shame to the great men of your state who recognize in him, yet fail to adore, the virtue of which he is the throne. To cut short his panegyric; he is all Wit, he is all Heart, and if by giving both these qualities (one of which formerly sufficed to mark a hero) to one person were not as good as naming Tristan L'Hermite,[40] I should not have mentioned his name, for I am sure he will not forgive me for this indiscretion. But as I do not expect ever to return to your World I desire to bear witness to this truth for my conscience's sake. Truly I must tell you that when I saw so high a virtue I feared that it was not recognized; for this reason I tried to make him accept three phials. The first was full of oil of Talc, the second of the powder of projection, and the third of potable Gold, that is to say, the vegetable salt whose eternity is promised by your chemists. But he refused them with a disdain more generous than that with which Diogenes received the compliments of Alexander who came to visit him in his tub. Finally I can add nothing to the praise of this great man except that he is the only Poet, the only Philosopher and the only free Man that you have. These are the eminent persons with whom I have conversed; all the others, at least those I knew, are so far below men that I have seen beasts who were above them.

"For the rest, I am not an inhabitant of your earth nor of this; I was born in the Sun; but because our world is sometimes overpeopled on account of the long life of its inhabitants and the fact that it is practically free from wars and diseases, our rulers from time to time send out colonies to the surrounding worlds. I was ordered to go to your Earth and declared leader of the expedition sent out with me. Since then I have come to this world for the reasons I told you; and I remain here because these men are lovers of truth; there are no pedants to be seen here, the philosophers allow themselves to be convinced by reason alone and neither the authority of a learned man nor numbers can overwhelm the opinion of a corn-thresher if the corn-thresher reason powerfully. In short the only madmen recognised in this country are the sophists and the orators."

I asked him how long they lived; he replied, "Three or four thousand years", and continued in this manner: "To render myself visible as I am now, when I feel the corpse I dwell in almost used up or when the organs do not exercise their functions perfectly, I breathe myself into a young body that has recently died.

"Although the inhabitants of the Sun are not so numerous as those of this World, nevertheless the Sun is often overcrowded, because the people are of a very hot temperament and consequently restless, ambitious and voracious.

"What I tell you ought not to seem a marvellous thing; for, although our globe is very vast and yours small, although we only die at the end of four thousand years and you after half a century, learn that, just as there are not so many pebbles as earth, nor so many insects as plants, nor so many animals as insects, nor so many men as animals; so there cannot be so many demons as men, because of the difficulties to be met with in the generation of so perfect a composition."

I asked him if they were bodies like us. He replied that, yes, they were bodies, but not like us nor like anything that we consider such, because we call vulgarly a body that which can be touched; for the rest, there was nothing in Nature that was not material,[41] and although they were material themselves, when they wished to be seen by us they were forced to take bodies such as our senses are capable of perceiving.

I assured him that many in the world thought the stories told of them were only an effect of the fancy of feeble-minded individuals, seeing that they only appeared at night. He replied that, since they were forced to build themselves hastily the bodies they had to make use of, they often had only time enough to fit them for a single sense, sometimes hearing, as the voices of Oracles; sometimes sight, as Will-o'-the-Wisps and Spectres; sometimes touch, as Incubi and Nightmares; and that this mass being only thickened air, the light destroyed it with its heat just as we see it disperse a fog by expanding it.

All these things he explained to me aroused in me the curiosity to question him about his birth and death; if in the country of the Sun the individual saw the day by the means of generation, and whether he died through the disintegration of his mind or the breaking down of his organs.

"There is too little connection", said he, "between your senses and the explanation of these mysteries. You imagine that what you cannot comprehend is spiritual or that it does not exist; the inference is false, but it is a proof that the universe contains perhaps a million things, to know which you would require a million different organs. Thus, I conceive through my senses the cause of the loadstone's turning to the north, the cause of the tides, and what an animal becomes after death; but you cannot rise to these high conceptions because there is nothing in you related to these miracles, any more than a child born blind can imagine the beauty of a landscape, the colouring of a picture, the tints of the rainbow; rather he will imagine them at one time as something palpable, then as something to eat, then as a sound, then as an odour. So if I tried to explain to you what I perceive through senses which you lack you would conceive it as something which can be heard, seen, touched, smelled or tasted, when it is nothing of the kind."

He was at this point of his discourse when my mountebank saw the company was growing weary of our jargon, for they could not understand it and mistook it for an inarticulate grunting. He began to pull heartily at my cord and made me gambol until the spectators had their fill of mirth and vowed I was nearly as clever as the animals in their country, and so went off to their homes.

The harshness of my master's bad treatment was softened by the visits of this obliging demon; I could not converse with those who came to see me, since they took me for an animal deeply rooted in the category of brutes; I did not know their language, they did not know mine! Judge then what relation there was between us.

You must know that two idioms are used in that country, one of which serves the nobles while the other is peculiar to the people.

The language of the nobles is simply different tones not articulated, very much like our music when no words have been added to it. Certainly it is an invention altogether useful and agreeable, for when they are tired of speaking, or when they disdain to prostitute their throats to this usage, they take a lute or some other instrument, with whose aid they communicate their thought as easily as by the voice; so that sometimes fifteen or twenty of them may be met with debating a point of theology or the difficulties of a law case in the most harmonious concert that could tickle one's ears.[42]

The second, which is used by the people, is carried out by movements of the limbs, though perhaps not precisely as you imagine, for certain parts of the body mean a whole speech. For example, the movement of a finger, of a hand, of an ear, of a lip, of an arm, of a cheek, will make singly a discourse or a sentence; others are only used to designate words, such as a wrinkle in the forehead, different shiverings of the muscles, turnings of the hands, stampings of the foot, contortions of the arm, so that, as it is their custom to go quite naked, when they talk their limbs (which are accustomed to gesticulate their ideas) move so briskly that it does not seem a man talking but a body trembling.

The demon came to visit me almost every day and his marvellous conversation helped me to endure the miseries of captivity without repining. One morning a man whom I did not know came into my lodging, and having well stroked me for a long time, gently lifted me up under the arm-pit; then, holding me with one hand lest I should be hurt, cast me upon his back, where I found myself seated so softly and so comfortably that although I was afflicted to find myself treated like a beast I had no desire to escape. Moreover these four-footed men move with a swiftness different from ours, since the heaviest of them can catch a running deer.

I was vastly perturbed at having no news of my courteous demon and on the evening of the first day's journey, after I had reached the inn, I was walking in the courtyard waiting for supper when my carrier, whose face was young and handsome, came up to me, laughing before my nose, and cast his two forefeet around my neck. After I had gazed at him for a while he said to me in French: "What! Do you not know your friend?" I leave you to imagine what I then felt. My surprise was so great that thereafter I imagined that the whole globe of the Moon, all that happened to me there, everything that I saw there, were an enchantment. The man-beast who had served me as a steed continued to speak in these words: "You had promised that the favours I did you would never leave your memory."

I protested that I had never seen him. At last he said: "I am that demon of Socrates who entertained you during the time of your captivity. As I had promised you, I left yesterday to inform the King of your misfortune and I covered three hundred leagues in eighteen hours, for I arrived at midday to await you...."

"But", I interrupted, "how can all this be, seeing that yesterday you were extremely tall and to-day you are very short; yesterday you had a weak broken voice and to-day it is strong and clear; in short, yesterday you were a hoary old man and to-day you are a young man? What! While in my country we travel from birth to death, do the animals of this land go from death to birth; do they grow younger the older they are?"

"When I had spoken to the Prince", said he, "and had received his order to bring you to him, I felt the body I inhabited so worn out with lassitude that all its organs refused their functions. I inquired the way to the hospital, went there, and as soon as I entered the first room found a young man who had just given up the ghost. I approached the body and feigning to have recognised movement in it I protested to all present that he was not dead, that his disease was not even dangerous, and without being perceived I skilfully breathed myself into him. My old body immediately fell backwards; and I rose up in this young one.[43] They exclaimed at the miracle, but without arguing with any one I went off promptly to your mountebank, where I took you up."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But let us look at the fate of the other elements which compose this log. The air retreats to its quarters still confused with the vapour because the angry fire sharply drove them out pell-mell. There it is tossed by the winds like a bladder, gives breath to animals, fills the void made by nature and perhaps will be enveloped in a drop of dew, sucked in and digested by the thirsty leaves of the very tree to which our fire has retired. The water, which the flame had driven from its throne and the heat had raised to the cradle of the meteors, will fall back as rain upon our oak as likely as upon another. And the Earth, made ashes, cured of its sterility by the nourishing warmth of a dung-hill upon which it has been cast or by the vegetable salt of neighbouring plants or by the fertile water of rivers, perhaps will also find itself beside this same oak, the natural heat of whose germ will draw it up and make it a particle of the whole oak.

"In this manner all these four elements return to the same state they had left some days earlier; and in the same way a man has in him everything necessary to make up a tree, and there is in a tree everything necessary to make up a man. Finally, in this way all things are met with in all things, but we lack a Prometheus to draw from the bosom of Nature and make sensible to us that which I wish to call 'primary matter'."

These are approximately the things with which we passed the time, and truly this little Spaniard had a pretty wit. Our conversation took place only at night, because from six o'clock in the morning until the evening, the crowds of people who came to look at us in our lodging prevented it. Some threw stones at us, some nuts, some grass; there was no talk but of the King's beasts. They fed us every day at regular hours and the King and Queen themselves often were pleased to touch my belly to find out if I were not pregnant, for they burned with an extraordinary desire to have a race of these little animals. I do not know whether I was more attentive to their grimaces and intonations than my male, but I learned to understand their language and to use it a little. Immediately the news ran through the whole kingdom that there had been found two wild men, smaller than others because of the poor nourishment solitude had furnished us with, who from some defect in their fathers' seed possessed fore-legs too weak to walk upon.

This belief would have taken root by circulating had not the priests of the country opposed it, saying this was a horrible impiety to believe that not only beasts but monsters were of their species.

"It is far more likely", proceeded the least impassioned, "that our domestic animals should share the privilege of humanity and consequently of immortality, since they are born in our land, than a monstrous beast which says it was born somewhere in the Moon. Then consider the difference to be noted between us and them: we walk on four feet because God did not wish to confide so precious a thing to a position less firm, He feared some accident might happen to man; that is why He Himself took the trouble to set man upon four columns, so that he should not fall, but disdaining to interfere in the construction of these two beasts He abandoned them to the caprice of Nature, who, not considering the loss of so slight a thing, set them upon two feet only.

"The very birds", they said, "were not so badly treated as these, for at least they have received feathers to make up for the weakness of their feet and to cast themselves into the air when we turn them out of our houses; but by taking two feet from these monsters Nature has put them in the position of being unable to escape our justice.

"Moreover, observe how their heads are turned up towards Heaven! They are placed in this position through the scarcity of all things which God has imposed upon them, for this posture of supplication shows that they seek Heaven to complain to Him who created them and to ask His permission to make shift with our scraps. But we have our heads turned downwards to contemplate the good things whereof we are lords and as having nothing in Heaven for our happy condition to envy."

Every day in my lodging I heard the priests make up these or similar tales. At length they so directed the people's conscience in the matter that it was decreed I should at best be held for nothing more than a plucked parrot; and they confirmed those already persuaded by the fact that I had only two feet like a bird. I was put in a cage by a special order of the upper council.

There the Queen's falconer came every day to whistle to me as we do with starlings. I was happy in that my cage did not lack food; and from the follies with which the spectators deafened my ears I learned to speak like them.

When I understood the idiom sufficiently to express the greater part of my conceptions I showed them how I could talk. Already in gatherings people were speaking of nothing but the prettiness of my jests; and the esteem for my wit grew to such a point that the Clergy were forced to publish a decree forbidding any one to believe that I possessed reason, with a very strict command to all persons of whatever rank and condition they might be to believe that any intellectual thing I did was only through instinct.

However, the definition of what I was divided the Town into two factions; the party which took sides in my favour increased every day. At length in spite of the anathema and the excommunication of the Prophets who tried in this way to terrify the people, my supporters demanded an assembly of the Estates of the realm to resolve this religious hitch. It was a long time before they could agree on the choice of judges, but the arbitrators pacified animosity by making the judges consist of an equal number from each party.

They carried me openly to the court of justice, where I was severely treated by the examiners. Among other things they asked me my philosophy. In all good faith I showed them what I had formerly been taught by my Master, but they had no difficulty in refuting me with numerous reasons, which were in truth very convincing. When I found myself wholly refuted, so that I could not reply, as a last refuge I alleged the Principles of Aristotle, which were no more useful to me than his Sophisms, for they showed me their falsity in a few words.

"Aristotle", said they, "fitted principles to his philosophy instead of fitting his philosophy to principles. And at least he ought to have proved these principles to be more reasonable than those of other sects, which he could not do. For this reason the good man must not complain if we agree to differ from him."

At last when they saw that I kept bawling this and nothing else, save that they were not more learned than Aristotle, and that I had been forbidden to argue with those who denied his Principles, they concluded with one accord that I was not a man but perhaps some sort of ostrich, seeing I carried my head upright like that bird; and so the falconer was ordered to take me back to the cage. I passed my time amusingly enough, for my possessing correctly their language was a cause that the whole Court diverted itself by making me chatter. Among others the Queen's ladies-in-waiting always thrust some scraps of food into my basket, and the prettiest of them all conceived a certain friendship for me. Once when we were alone I discovered to her the mysteries of our religion and I discoursed principally of our bells and our relics; she was so transported with joy that she vowed with tears in her eyes that if ever I were able to fly back to our world she would gladly follow me.

One day I woke up early with a start and saw her tapping against the bars of my cage. "I have good news for you!" said she, "yesterday the council declared for war against the great King

; and I hope, with the bustle of preparation and the departure of our Monarch and his subjects, to find an opportunity to set you free."

"War!" I interrupted immediately, "do the Princes of this world quarrel among themselves like those of ours? Tell me, I beseech you, how they fight."

"The Umpires elected by the consent of both parties", she replied, "fix the time allowed for arming, the time of marching, the number of combatants, the day and place of the battle; all with such impartiality that neither army has a single man more than the other. On each side the maimed soldiers are enrolled in one company and on the day of battle the Generals are careful to send them against the maimed soldiers on the other side. The giants are opposed by the colossi, the fencers by the nimble, the valiant by the courageous, the weak by the feeble, the unhealthy by the sick, the robust by the strong; and if someone should strike any but his prescribed enemy he is found guilty of cowardice unless he can clear himself by showing it was a mistake. After the battle they count the wounded, the dead and the prisoners, for none is ever seen to run away. If the losses are equal on each side they draw lots as to who shall be proclaimed the victor. But although a King may have defeated his enemy in open war he has achieved little; there are other less numerous armies of men of wit and learning, upon whose disputes depends wholly the real triumph or servitude of States. A man of learning is opposed to another, men of wit and judgment are set against their like; and the triumph gained by a State in this way is considered equal to three victories of brute force. When a nation is proclaimed victorious, they break up the assembly and the conquering people chooses for its King either their own or that of their enemies."

I could not forbear laughing at this scrupulous manner of making war and as an example of a far stronger policy I alleged the customs of our Europe, where the Monarch takes care to omit no opportunity of conquest; and she answered me in this way: