Diderot and the Encyclopaedists Volume II Part 20

_He._--Try as hard as they will, they will never touch me--not the best of them. Palissot, for instance, will never be more than a good learner. But if this part is amusing at first, and if you have some relish in inwardly mocking at the folly of the people whom you are intoxicating, in the long run that ceases to be exciting, and then after a certain number of discoveries one is obliged to repeat one's self. Wit and art have their limits. 'Tis only G.o.d Almighty and some rare geniuses, for whom the career widens as they advance.

_I._--With this precious enthusiasm for fine things, and this facility of genius of yours, is it possible that you have invented nothing?

_He._--Pardon me; for instance, that admiring att.i.tude of the back, of which I spoke to you; I regard it as my own, though envy may contest my claim. I daresay it has been employed before: but who has felt how convenient it was for laughing in one's sleeve at the a.s.s for whom one was dying of admiration! I have more than a hundred ways of opening fire on a girl under the very eyes of her mother, without the latter suspecting a jot of it; yes, and even of making her an accomplice. I had hardly begun my career before I disdained all the vulgar fas.h.i.+ons of slipping a _billet-doux_; I have ten ways of having them taken from me, and out of the number I venture to flatter myself there are some that are new. I possess in an especial degree the gift of encouraging a timid young man; I have secured success for some who had neither wit nor good looks.

If all that was written down, I fancy people would concede me some genius.

_I._--And would do you singular honour.

_He._--I don't doubt it.

_I._--In your place, I would put those famous methods on paper. It would be a pity for them to be lost.

_He._--It is true; but you could never suppose how little I think of method and precepts. He who needs a protocol will never go far.

Your genius reads little, experiments much, and teaches himself.

Look at Caesar, Turenne, Vauban, the Marquise de Tencin, her brother the cardinal, and the cardinal's secretary, the Abbe Trublet, and Bouret! Who is it that has given lessons to Bouret? n.o.body; 'tis nature that forms these rare men.

_I._--Well, but you might do this in your lost hours, when the anguish of your empty stomach, or the weariness of your stomach overloaded, banishes slumber.

_He._--I'll think of it. It is better to write great things than to execute small ones. Then the soul rises on wings, the imagination is kindled; whereas it shrivels in amazement at the applause which the absurd public lavishes so perversely on that mincing creature of a Dangeville, who plays so flatly, who walks the stage nearly bent double, who stares affectedly and incessantly into the eyes of every one she talks to, and who takes her grimaces for finesse, and her little strut for grace; or on that emphatic Clairon, who becomes more studied, more pretentious, more elaborately heavy, than I can tell you. That imbecile of a pit claps hands to the echo, and never sees that we are a mere worsted ball of daintinesses ('Tis true the ball grows a trifle big, but what does it matter?), that we have the finest skin, the finest eyes, the prettiest bill; little feeling inside, in truth; a step that is not exactly light, but which for all that is not as awkward as they say. As for sentiment, on the other hand, there is not one of these stage dames whom we cannot cap.

_I._--What do you mean by all that? Is it irony or truth?

_He._--The worst of it is that this deuced sentiment is all internal, and not a glimpse of it appears outside; but I who am now talking to you, I know, and know well, that she has it. If it is not that, you should see, if a fit of ill-humour comes on, how we treat the valets, how the waiting-maids are cuffed and trounced, what kicks await our good friend, if he fails in an atom of that respect which is our due. 'Tis a little demon, I tell you, full of sentiment and dignity. Ah, you don't quite know where you are, eh?

_I._--I confess I can hardly make out whether you are speaking in good faith or in malice. I am a plain man. Be kind enough to be a little more outspoken, and to leave your art behind for once....

_He._--What is it? why it is what we retail before our little patroness about the Dangeville or the Clairon, mixed up here and there with a word or two to put you on the scent. I will allow you to take me for a good-for-nothing, but not for a fool; and 'tis only a fool, or a man eaten up with conceit, who could say such a parcel of impertinences seriously.

_I._--But how do people ever bring themselves to say them?

_He._--It is not done all at once, but little by little you come to it. _Ingenii largitor venter._

_I._--Then hunger must press you very hard.

_He._--That may be; yet strong as you may think them, be sure that those to whom they are addressed are much more accustomed to listen to them than we are to hazard them.

_I._--Is there anybody who has courage to be of your opinion?

_He._--What do you mean by anybody? It is the sentiment and language of the whole of society.

_I._--Those of you who are not great rascals must be great fools.

_He._--Fools! I a.s.sure you there is only one, and that is he who feasts us to cheat him.

_I._--But how can people allow themselves to be cheated in such gross fas.h.i.+on? For surely the superiority of the Dangeville and the Clairon is a settled thing.

_He._--We swallow until we are full to the throat any lie that flatters us, and take drop by drop a truth that is bitter to us.

And then we have the air of being so profoundly penetrated, so true.

_I._--Yet you must once, at any rate, have sinned against the principles of art, and let slip, by an oversight, some of those bitter truths that wound; for, in spite of the wretched, abject, vile, abominable part you play, I believe you have at bottom some delicacy of soul.

_He._--I! not the least in the world. Deuce take me if I know what I am! In a general way, I have a mind as round as a ball, and a character fresh as a water-willow. Never false, little interest as I have in being true; never true, little interest as I have in being false. I say things just as they come into my head; sensible things, then so much the better; impertinent things, then people take no notice. I let my natural frankness have full play. I never in all my life gave a thought, either beforehand, what to say, or while I was saying it, or after I had said it. And so I offend n.o.body.

_I._--Still that did happen with the worthy people among whom you used to live, and who were so kind to you.

_He._--What would you have? It is a mishap, an unlucky moment, such as there always are in life; there is no such thing as unbroken bliss: I was too well off, it could not last. We have, as you know, the most numerous and the best chosen company. It is a school of humanity, the renewal of hospitality after the antique. All the poets who fall, we pick them up; all decried musicians, all the authors who are never read, all the actresses who are hissed, a parcel of beggarly, disgraced, stupid, parasitical souls, and at the head of them all I have the honour of being the brave chief of a timorous flock. It is I who exhort them to eat the first time they come, and I who ask for drink for them--they are so shy. A few young men in rags who do not know where to lay their heads, but who have good looks; a few scoundrels who bamboozle the master of the house, and put him to sleep, for the sake of gleaning after him in the fields of the mistress of the house. We seem gay, but at bottom we are devoured by spleen and a raging appet.i.te. Wolves are not more famis.h.i.+ng, nor tigers more cruel. Like wolves when the ground has been long covered with snow, we raven over our food, and whatever succeeds we rend like tigers. Never was seen such a collection of soured, malignant, venomous beasts. You hear nothing but the names of Buffon, Duclos, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot; and G.o.d knows the epithets that bear them company! n.o.body can have any parts if he is not as stupid as ourselves. That is the plan on which Palissot's play of _The Philosophers_ has been conceived. And you are not spared in it, any more than your neighbours.

_I._--So much the better. Perhaps they do me more honour than I deserve. I should be humiliated if those who speak ill of so many clever and worthy people took it into their heads to speak well of me.

_He._--Everybody must pay his scot. After sacrificing the greater animals, then we immolate the others.

_I._--Insulting science and virtue for a living, that is dearly-earned bread!

_He._--I have already told you, we are without any consistency; we insult all the world, and afflict n.o.body. We have sometimes the heavy Abbe d'Olivet, the big Abbe Le Blanc, the hypocrite Batteux.

The big abbe is only spiteful before he has had his dinner; his coffee taken, he throws himself into an arm-chair, his feet against the ledge of the fireplace, and sleeps like an old parrot on its perch. If the noise becomes violent he yawns, stretches his arms, rubs his eyes, and says: "Well, well, what is it?" "It is whether Piron has more wit than Voltaire." "Let us understand; is it wit that you are talking about, or is it taste? For as to taste, your Piron has not a suspicion of it." "Not a suspicion of it?" "No."

And there we are, embarked in a dissertation upon taste. Then the patron makes a sign with his hand for people to listen to him, for if he piques himself upon one thing more than another, it is taste.

"Taste," he says, "taste is a thing...." But, on my soul, I don't know what thing he said that it was, nor does he.

Then sometimes we have friend Robbe. He regales us with his equivocal stories, with the miracles of the convulsionnaires which he has seen with his own eyes, and with some cantos of a poem on a subject that he knows thoroughly. His verses I detest, but I love to hear him recite them--he has the air of an energumen. They all cry out around him: "There is a poet worth calling a poet!..."

Then there comes to us also a certain noodle with a dull and stupid air, but who has the keenness of a demon, and is more mischievous than an old monkey. He is one of those figures that provoke pleasantries and sarcasms, and that G.o.d made for the chastis.e.m.e.nt of those who judge by appearances, and who ought to have learnt from the mirror that it is as easy to be a wit with the air of a fool as to hide a fool under the air of a wit. 'Tis a very common piece of cowardice to immolate a good man to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the others; people never fail to turn to this man; he is a snare that we set for the new-comers, and I have scarcely known one of them who was not caught ...

[I was sometimes amazed at the justice of my madman's observations on men and characters, and I showed him my surprise.] That is, he answered, because one derives good out of bad company, as one does out of libertinism. You are recompensed for the loss of your innocence by that of your prejudices; in the society of the bad, where vice shows itself without a mask, you learn to understand them. And then I have read a little.

_I._--What have you read?

_He._--I have read, and I read, and I read over and over again Theophrastus and La Bruyere and Moliere.

_I._--Excellent works, all of them.

_He._--They are far better than people suppose; but who is there who knows how to read them?

_I._--Everybody does, according to the measure of his intelligence.

_He._--No; hardly anybody. Could you tell me what people look for in them?

_I._--Amus.e.m.e.nt and instruction.

_He._--But what instruction, for that is the point?

_I._--The knowledge of one's duties, the love of virtue, the hatred of vice.

_He._--For my part, I gather from them all that one ought to do, and all that one ought not to say. Thus, when I read the _Avare_, I say to myself: "Be a miser if thou wilt, but beware of talking like the miser." When I read _Tartufe_, I say: "Be a hypocrite if thou wilt, but do not talk like a hypocrite. Keep the vices that are useful to thee, but avoid their tone and the appearances that would make thee laughable." To preserve thyself from such a tone and such appearances, it is necessary to know what they are. Now these authors have drawn excellent pictures of them. I am myself, and I remain what I am, but I act and I speak as becomes the character. I am not one of those who despise moralists; there is a great deal of profit to be got from them, especially with those who have applied morality to action. Vice only hurts men from time to time; the characteristics of vice hurt them from morning to night.

Perhaps it would be better to be insolent than to have an insolent expression. One who is insolent in character only insults people now and again; one who is insolent in expression insults them incessantly. And do not imagine that I am the only reader of my kind. I have no other merit in this respect than having done on system, from a natural integrity of understanding, and with true and reasonable vision, what most others do by instinct. And so their readings make them no better than I am, and they remain ridiculous in spite of themselves, while I am only so when I choose, and always leave them a vast distance behind me; for the same art which teaches me how to escape ridicule on certain occasions teaches me also on certain others how to incur it happily. Then I recall to myself all that the others said, and all that I read, and I add all that issues from my own originality, which is in this kind wondrous fertile.

_I._--You have done well to reveal these mysteries to me, for otherwise I should have thought you self-contradictory.

_He._--I am not so in the least, for against a single time when one has to avoid ridicule, happily there are a hundred when one has to provoke it. There is no better part among the great people than that of fool. For a long time there was the king's fool; at no time was there ever the king's sage, officially so styled. Now I am the fool of Bertin and many others, perhaps yours at the present moment, or perhaps you are mine. A man who meant to be a sage would have no fool, so he who has a fool is no sage; if he is not a sage he is a fool, and perhaps, even were he the king himself, the fool of his fool. For the rest, remember that in a matter so variable as manners, there is nothing absolutely, essentially, and universally true or false; if not that one must be what interest would have us be, good or bad, wise or mad, decent or ridiculous, honest or vicious. If virtue had happened to be the way to fortune, then I should either have been virtuous, or I should have pretended virtue, like other persons. As it was, they wanted me to be ridiculous, and I made myself so; as for being vicious, nature alone had taken all the trouble that was needed in that. When I use the term vicious, it is for the sake of talking your language; for, if we came to explanations, it might happen that you called vice what I call virtue, and virtue what I call vice.