The Last Fay Page 2

  The wife that the chemist had married for her naivety and the limited extent of her knowledge deployed all her soul over her child, and became intelligent regarding everything that concerned him; she lived on the breath of the little being that played on her bosom, after having extracted therefrom a milk as pure as his mother’s soul, and the blissful chemist perceived that nature had crucibles more beautiful than his and a method of combining mixtures far superior to his.

  That chemist was one of the most astonishing and original minds that the sun’s fire had ever warned. If ideas depend on the interior form of the brain, his own must have had the bizarre aspect of the chemical products that apothecaries expose to the curiosity of passers-by, and which present such brilliant crystallizations. Since his childhood, he had only lived for the arts and had done nothing but study the natural sciences with ardor. Thus, he had such a profound and solid knowledge of human nature that, to begin with, he had, as we have just seen, a child; but afterwards, he succeeded in knowing the physical mechanisms of our machine so well that merely by visual examination he could discover the symptoms, the progress and the cause of a malady, and cure it rapidly and painlessly.

  That perfection of science did not only relate to the body; It was applied to the soul, and he knew the cause of our pains and our pleasures, our passions and our virtues, with such a superiority that, first of all, he and his wife had attained the perfection of happiness and their marriage was as pure as the African sky; but thereafter he suddenly knew what such and such a man needed in order to be happy, after having examined him briefly; as soon as he had palpated the head, the foot and the spine, he could tell him what he ought to do, and even to say, in a given social situation.

  What proves his extreme wisdom and the sublimity of his mind is that, having reached the summit of human science, he lived in his laboratory, with a cricket, a mouse, Caliban, a few spiders, his wife and his child. To be sure, the chemist could have gone to Paris, where he would have amassed as much glory as a hundred thousand men, but he had reflected and had seen:

  That if he cured everyone, everyone would come to him, that there would not have been any more sick people, and hence no more physicians, and that the physicians would then have invited him to pass into the third hemisphere;

  That, divining all interests, he would have accommodated all legal disputes, and that, the lawyers imitating the doctors, his science would cause him to run the risk of falling into the hands of prosecutors—for he cut the questioning short—even crueler than physicians;

  That if the government learned that he could make diamonds, he would be locked up like the donkey in “Peau-d’âne” in order to make diamonds perpetually,2 or his eyes might be put out, or some similar step taken, to prevent him from doing it—and in either case, he would find governments even crueler than doctors and lawyers;

  That, finally, the perfectibility of human reason would become the ruination of society, which only exists because of everyone’s follies, maladies, stupidities, passions, itches and taxes.

  Then, he had had the incredible rationality to compare the glory he would have acquired with the smoke of his furnace; wealth with the charcoal that blackened his hands and whose vapor would end up killing him; and, seizing the god of happiness by the ears, he made it his task never to let him go, by never leaving his cottage.

  It was thus that he simplified his existence. To give himself an occupation, he tried to discover new secrets, took a pretty wife who did nothing, knew nothing and hardly spoke, and an idiotic domestic, and decreed that for all of them, nature began at the cabin door and finished at the garden wall.

  In the evening, they went out for a stroll along a covered pathway, admired the pure air of the sky; the chemist complimented Caliban on the appearance of the garden, and he compared the mysterious light of the stars to the amorous gleam in his wife’s eyes. She smiled in thinking that she was as beautiful as a star, and she adored her husband; Caliban admired the fact that they had so much intelligence—and they went back to their cottage, happy and content, laughing at other people, whom the chemist depicted to them frantically trying to capture soap-bubbles that burst in their hands. And the three individuals made their way in life, as healthy as sturdy oaks, seeing a rose in each of their smiles, a bouquet in every thought, and a pearl in every speech, having no time to desire because they worked all day and slept all night: happy, a thousand times happy!

  In that regard, the chemist, clapping his hands and depositing a kiss on the lips of his wife—who thought that all men were chemists—applauded his decision, and thought that he had solved the greatest problem of all, that of a happy life.

  From then on, he stirred his crucibles more and more, sought with an unparalleled ardor to steal one secret more from nature, and tried to explain to his wife what he was doing. She did not understand any of it, but she listened attentively, as if she understood something, for she would have given all the sciences for a smile for her little Abel, and all the ducal crowns in Europe for a word from her husband.

  Those three individuals has no communication with the rest of creation, and that needs proof; for that, it is necessary to go back into their past life and explain how they came to be living in such profound retreat.

  Adjacent to their cottage flourished a garden that seemed made expressly for them; vegetables took pleasure in growing there, the trellis buckled under the grapes, and a pure and limpid spring watered that little corner of the promised land. The chemist, whose wife believed everything that her husband said—if he had claimed that it was day in the middle of a winter night she would have replied that she could see the sun—had proved to her that in only eating vegetables, the passions were less ardent and the intelligence keener, so they lived on the produce of that terrain, where two chickens found their nourishment and a cow its fresh grass.

  Caliban, the domestic of that fortunate household, gathered the grapes and the harvest, milled the grain by means of a machine invented by the chemist, and knew no other existence than getting up in the morning, cultivating the garden, eating soberly, preparing the chemist’s meals, spinning in winter, making cloth and going to bed; furthermore, he had suppressed usage of thought as something too fatiguing, and the nec plus ultra of his employment was going to pay the tax-collector of the commune the seventeen francs that the chemist owed annually for his two arpents of land, his wife, his chickens, his cricket, his mouse, his spiders, Caliban, the cow, the brat, the rat and a poor black dog that was the friend of the entire household. Thus, the French government assembled the two Chambres, equipped the conscripts with their rifles, uniforms, captain, colonel, chief of general staff and almoner, all to give assistance and protection to its seven immense ministries and its colossal administration of fourteen things, for a modest sum of seventeen francs! In truth, how can one complain about the burden of taxes?

  The cottage in which they lived…what do I see? Great God, twenty-five pages! Times are so hard that no one will ever read a longer chapter.

  Chapter II

  The Chemist’s Opinions

  The cottage in which those four individuals made for one another lived (this is the continuation of the proof of their isolation) merits an exact description, for one cannot put too much verity into a fairy tale; then, at least, if the basis is false, the details are true. So, you should know that the happy cottage was situated twenty leagues from Paris, in one of those valleys to which nature seems to have retreated with all her treasures. There were the most picturesque situations, the most elegant trees, the most cheerful meadows, the freshness of limpid streams, a hanging vine, a mill and its sonorous cascade, and, in the midst of that landscape, more than one young woman singing without cadence in her pure voice. Thus, the echo of the songs in question, which mingled with the sounds of the herdsman’s pastoral flute, added to the delights of nature the charm of melancholy, which only ever comes from humans.

  In sum, it was a valley so pleasant, so remote, and so distant from any cit
y, that all disgraced ministers would have wanted to live there during the initial phase of their fall. The present minister will find the address at the end of the story.

  As the chemist offered nothing to thieves but science books, charcoal, retorts, little bottles and ink, he had been able, without danger, to live in a cottage situated on the slope of a pretty hill, from which that enchanting view could be seen, and which was some distance from the nearby village. The chemist always left his door open, and that habit went well with the simplicity of their way of life. The cottage was placed in such a way that the chimney was on a level with the plateau of the hill, above which an immense forest commenced, from which the chemist obtained his charcoal and the precious ingredients he needed

  Here it becomes urgently necessary to make an observation that will support the assertion that it is necessary to prove. Those who have traveled a little know that there are in France remote spots, little villages buried in lands far from roads, where people live in profound ignorance of things of this world, where people only learn about social revolutions from changes in the arms found printed at the top of the tax-collector’s forms or the sign above the tobacconist’s shop—a sign that, in parentheses, contains the history of the last twenty years written in six layers of different colors. They are villages, in sum, where those who do not pay taxes and do not take tobacco live and die without knowing who the mortal that governs them is, and will never know of the existence of oil of Macassar, Lord Byron, hydrogen gas, bell-tents, duchesses or water-carriers. That is a great misfortune for sovereigns, poets, gas-manufacturers and, most of all, duchesses, but it is the truth—and that luminous observation has no other purpose than to inform you that the village a quarter of a league from which the chemist’s habitation stood was one of those fortunate villages.

  That’s not all! The chemist’s habitation was surrounded by another cordon sanitaire of ignorance even more impossible to cross, which had been woven by superstition and the village beadle. To sense its force fully it is necessary to go back to the epoch of the chemist’s arrival in the region.

  It was night—an obscure night, for the moon was circling silently between big clouds, black in the middle and yellow-tinted at the edges. It was a Saturday, the day of the Sabbat, and the last Saturday in the month of December, the epoch of the general assembly of witches. Caliban, the bearer of a horrible face, which made him resemble an imp extracted from great cauldron no. 1, which is stirred with a red skimmer, was leading by the bridle a poor skinny nag that had the air of the one of the Apocalypse whose bones can be counted, and which carries Death.

  That horse was dragging an open cart that allowed the sight of a host of mortars, retorts, scientific instruments, quadrants, globes, test tubes, telescopes, furnaces, etc., and in the bosom of that chemical cargo sat the chemist in person, his head covered by a bearskin cap, wearing spectacles, and using both hands to hold his books and his ingredients in place.

  The winter wind was whistling, and more than one tree branch fell on to the thatched roofs, producing a phantasmal noise that caused the circle to tighten of those who were sitting around a somber hearth, listening to the tales of an old woman whose face resembled the rennet-apples eaten at Pentecost.

  The ground, being covered in snow, did not permit the footfalls of Caliban’s horse to be heard, nor the noise of the infernal cart, with the consequence that it was possible to believe, on seeing the frightful cortege pass, through poor windows full of flaws, that it was dancing in the air. The bell that was tolling at that moment for a funeral, the frightful tales of grandmothers, fear, Caliban’s oaths, the whistling of the tempest, and the bloody light of the moon, which gave the spectacle the air of the devil’s convoy, all contributed to sowing such terror that the man who had sold the cottage and the enclosure to the chemist—with some difficulty—washed the coins in vinegar and believed that the bonnet of Liberty was the devil’s claw; he could only get anyone else to take them in the next village, to which he went for the first time in his life.

  All that might not have had any consequence if the chemist had been seen thereafter behaving like a normal person, coming to market, drinking in the tavern and smoking a pipe, but no, none of that happened.

  So, curiosity being the same everywhere, people went to investigate what was happening in the home of the devil’s envoy. Nothing was seen coming out of his abode; everything there seemed dead, except that an abundant black smoke was swirling above the enormous chimney of his cottage—from which it was concluded that Satan had established one of Hell’s ventilation-shafts there; all the more so as the chemist had enlarged his fireplace in such a fashion that a cavalier with his lance, his pennant, his horse, his carbine and his turned-up moustache could have passed into it without the cockade on his shako suffering any damage. Certainly, on seeing such a chimney always occupied in vomiting smoke, the most impassive peasant was obliged to draw sinister conclusions. Others might perhaps have been astonished if it had not smoked, but in a village, and especially an ignorant village, things proceed differently than they do elsewhere.

  What brought the terror to a peak, and completed the construction of an impenetrable rampart between the cottage and the village, was the beadle’s story. The latter, fortified by the sacerdotal authority that he had as a clerical instrument of the Law, chanced one evening to go to the habitation, partly because the curé desired to know whether the chemist, devilry notwithstanding, would be making the bread offering.

  The beadle—an important man in the village, for he could read fluently and calculate—who had a strong mind, perceived the frightful Caliban sitting on a large stone covered in moss; he was playing with his dear black dog, which was confounding its intelligent head with that of the domestic with the turned-up nose and thick lips that allowed a glimpse of teeth like pallets. The chemist had a face as black as an oven; he was dressed grotesquely, like all busy scientists; he was caressing his long black beard with hands as slender as those of a midwife; and madame his wife, laying her pretty head brilliant with amour on her husband’s shoulder, was mingling the gold of her blonde tresses with the chemist’s abundant jet black hair; her pale and delicate hands, caressing her husband’s beard, indicated that she wanted to prevent him from meditating, and desired a soft gaze of affection.

  The setting sun spread a ruddy glow over the group, which caused the beadle to believe that the cottage was the porch of Hell. What he had been told about the temptation of Saint Anthony returned to his mind, and Caliban appeared to him as a great ape sitting on a giant tortoise; his dog was a horned demon; a stone covered in green moss was the large toad that leapt into the saint’s water-jug; the chemist’s beautiful wife was the pretty she-devil with the amorous hands, the celestial face and the eyes of a courtesan who wants her account settled; and, finally, the chemist seemed to him to be the chief devil surrounded by serpents, and Caliban’s spade his fork. But what caused the disorder in the beadle’s senses was that, when he arrived, the cricket, the chickens, the cow and the dog were crying; the chemist and his wife were laughing in bursts and Caliban was cursing, because the dog had nipped his ear.

  The beadle was terrified, and fled, believing that a thousand basketfuls of devils were on his heels; he recounted everywhere that he had run the greatest dangers, and that it would be folly to go on to the hill where the chemist—or rather the Devil—lived.

  In the superstitious times in which young women who had nightmares were burned, claiming that they were prey to an incubus, things had been seen no less astonishing than what the beadle reported. The ignorant village believed that individual’s story, and no one any longer looked at the cottage without fear mingled with curiosity; thus, a double barrier of ignorance and dread served as a boundary wall for the village and the blissful cottage, which found itself, as we have already seen, separated from the rest of creation.

  Let us therefore return to the chemist and his meek and ignorant wife, to Caliban the idiot and little Abel, the cricket, th
e mouse, etc,

  As Abel grew older, he played with the dog, often stuck his dainty fingers into the cricket’s hole, and teased the mouse, but those worthy creatures were not annoyed by that, all the more so because Abel’s mother, when he caught the cricket one day, made him understand that he must not injure it. Oh, she knew what she was doing, the poor mother, when she explained to him that she would suffer if anyone hurt Abel; so the dear child said, in the tender voice of infancy: “Go, little cricket,” and watched it march away, smiling angelically.

  At that scene, which you might perhaps think overly naïve, the chemist quit his furnaces, allowing one of the most beautiful fluids he had ever found to evaporate, and, sitting down on a stool, played with his child as if he were a child himself; and Caliban, putting all his weight on his spade, desired a wife.

  Abel was not confined in any swaddling-clothes; his delicate limbs developed in liberty; he roamed around the laboratory, making his mother shiver every time he bumped into bottles, poisons and acids, but Abel reassured her, calling in his soft voice “I’m being careful, Mother!” He tangled the thousand curls of his beautiful hair with spider’s webs, smeared his face with charcoal, climbed on the furnaces, wanted to taste everything, touch everything, and laughed, frolicking without chagrin and without constraint—and nature smiled on the divine tableau that the laboratory presented, where she reigned as sovereign.

  But who could describe the joy, the delight and the stamping feet of Abel when his mother, opening a volume of the Cabinet des fées, showed him the illustrations? He deployed all the force of his beautiful dark eyes, moist with the sap of infancy, and resembled an infant Jesus by Raphael, when, grouped around his mother, who still seemed a pure virgin, he admired the Green Serpent, Gracieuse and Percinet, the Blue Bird, and the Fay Truitonne; but the most beautiful illustration, the one that excited his ecstasy the most, was that of the Fay Abricotine.3