Such were my rules of conscience concerning falsehood and truth. My heart followed these rules automatically before my reason had adopted them, and my moral instinct alone put them into practice. The criminal lie of which poor Marion was the victim left me with everlasting remorse which has preserved me for the rest of my life, not only from all lies of this kind, but also from all those which could in any way affect the interests or reputation of others. By making this complete exclusion, I have saved myself from having to weigh up exactly particular rights and wrongs and identify the precise distinctions between harmful lies and white lies; by regarding both as reprehensible, I have ruled them both out equally.
In this as in everything else, my temperament has had a great influence on my principles, or rather on my habits, for I have hardly ever acted according to rules or followed in all things any rule other than that of the promptings of my nature. Never has a premeditated lie come near my mind, and never have I lied to my own advantage; but I have often lied out of shame in order to get myself out of a difficult situation in trivial matters or in matters which concerned me alone, when, having to keep a conversation going, the slowness of my ideas and my dearth of small talk forced me to have recourse to fiction in order to have something to say.* When I am obliged to speak and amusing truths do not spring to mind quickly enough, I tell stories so as not to remain silent; but in making up these stories I am careful as far as possible not to tell lies, that is, to ensure that they do not offend against justice or due truth and that they should simply be fictions that are indifferent to everyone and to me. What I should like to do in telling them is at least to substitute a moral truth for factual truth, that is to depict accurately the human heart’s natural affections and to draw from them some useful lesson, to turn them, in short, into moral tales or apologues, but I would need more presence of mind and a greater ease with words than I have to be able to make something instructive out of idle chatter. Conversation, flowing faster than my ideas and forcing me almost always to speak before thinking, has often led me to make stupid and inept remarks which my reason disapproved of and which my heart disowned even before they had passed my lips, but which, spoken before I could apply my judgement, were no longer susceptible to being corrected by its censure.
It is also because of this instinctive and irresistible impulse of my temperament that, in sudden, unforeseen moments, shame and timidity often tear from me lies in which my will has no role but which in a way anticipate it, given the need to respond there and then. The deep impression made on me by the memory of poor Marion may well always stop me from telling those lies which could otherwise be harmful to others, but not those which can help me to get out of a difficult situation when I alone am involved, though these go no less against my conscience and my principles than those which can have an influence on what happens to other people.
I swear to Heaven that if I could instantly withdraw the lie which absolves me and tell the truth which condemns me without disgracing myself still further by recanting, I would do so with all my heart; but the shame of catching myself out in this way still holds me back, and I repent very sincerely of my failing, yet without daring to make amends. An example will explain better what I mean and show that I do not lie out of personal interest or self-love, and still less out of envy or malice, but simply out of embarrassment and false shame, knowing full well sometimes that the lie is known as such and can be of no use to me whatsoever.
Some time ago Monsieur Foulquier* persuaded me, against my custom, to take my wife out to join him and his friend Benoît* for lunch at the restaurant owned by Madame Vacassin, who also ate with us, together with her two daughters. In the middle of the meal, the elder daughter, who had recently married and was pregnant, took it upon herself to ask me abruptly, staring right at me as she did so, if I had any children. I replied, bright red, that I had not had that happiness.* She smiled maliciously at the rest of the group. It was all quite obvious, even to me.
It is clear, first, that this is not the answer I should have given, even if I had wanted to deceive them, since, given the apparent frame of mind of the woman who had put the question to me, I was quite sure that my negative answer would do nothing to change her opinion on the subject. This negative answer was expected, indeed I was provoked into giving it so that she could enjoy the pleasure of making me lie. I was not so stupid as not to realize that. Two minutes later, the answer I should have given came to me in a flash: ‘That’s a very indiscreet question for a young woman to ask a long-time bachelor.’ By saying this, without lying and without having to make an embarrassing confession, I would have had the laughers on my side and taught her a little lesson which would naturally have made her a little less impertinent when questioning me. But I did nothing of the sort: I did not say what I should have said; I said what I should not have said and what could do me no good. So it is clear that neither my judgement nor my will dictated my response and that it was the automatic effect of my embarrassment. In the past I did not get embarrassed in this way and I confessed my faults with more frankness than shame because I was sure that people would see, as I did, deep inside me, those qualities which redeemed them; but the eye of malice wounds and disconcerts me; with my misfortunes I have become more timid, and I have only ever lied out of timidity.
I have never felt more keenly my natural aversion to lying than when I was writing my Confessions, for it is there that I could have been frequently and sorely tempted to lie, if I had been so inclined. But far from having passed over or concealed anything that could be used in evidence against me, by a turn of mind which I struggle to understand and which perhaps derives from my antipathy towards all kinds of imitation, I felt more inclined to lie in the opposite way, by accusing myself too severely rather than by excusing myself too indulgently, and my conscience assures me that one day I shall be judged less severely than I judged myself. Yes, I can say and feel with a proud, uplifted soul that in this work I took good faith, truthfulness, and openness as far as, or even further than, any other man has ever done, or at least I believe so; feeling that the good surpassed the bad, it was in my interest to tell the whole truth, and so I told the whole truth.
I never said less than the truth, but sometimes I said more than it, not in the facts themselves, but in the circumstances surrounding them, and this kind of lie was the result of my confused imagination rather than an act of will. I am in fact wrong to call this a lie, since none of these additions was actually a lie. I wrote my Confessions when I was already old and disillusioned by the vain pleasures of life, all of which I had tasted and the emptiness of which my heart had felt. I wrote them from memory; my memory often failed me or only provided me with imperfect recollections, and I filled in the gaps with details which I dreamed up to complete those recollections, but which never contradicted them. I enjoyed dwelling on the happy times in my life, and sometimes I embellished them with ornaments which my fond regrets provided me with. I talked about the things I had forgotten as I thought they must have been, or as they perhaps really had been, but never contradicting what I remembered them to have been. I sometimes invested the truth with exotic charms, but I never replaced it with lies to cover up my vices or to lay claim to virtue.*
If sometimes, thoughtlessly and involuntarily, I concealed my ugly side by painting myself in profile,* these omissions were made up for by other, more bizarre omissions which often made me pass over the good more carefully than the bad. This is a peculiarity of my nature which it is quite excusable for men not to believe, but which, although incredible, is no less real: I often presented what was bad in all its baseness, but I rarely presented what was good in all its worthiness, and I often passed over it completely because it did me too much credit and because it would have looked as if I was praising myself by writing my Confessions. I described my early years without boasting about the fine qualities with which my heart was endowed, and indeed I suppressed those facts which drew too much attention to them. I shall recall here two inst
ances from my earliest youth, both of which I remembered when I was writing but which I rejected for the very reason I have just mentioned.
I used to spend nearly every Sunday in Les Pâquis at the home of Monsieur Fazy, who had married one of my aunts and who had a calico works there.* One day I was in the drying room where the calender was, looking at its cast-iron rollers: I liked their shiny appearance, I was tempted to touch them, and I was enjoying running my fingers over the smooth cylinder when Fazy’s son, who had got inside the wheel, gave it a half-quarter turn so nimbly that it just caught the ends of my two middle fingers, but that was enough for the ends of them to be crushed and for the two nails to be torn off. I let out a piercing cry and Fazy instantly turned the wheel back, but my nails were still on the cylinder and blood was streaming from my fingers. Fazy cried out in shock, jumped out of the wheel, threw his arms around me, and begged me not to cry so loudly, adding that he would be in serious trouble. At the height of my own pain I was touched by his, I stopped crying, and we went to the pond, where he helped me wash my fingers and stem the flow of blood with moss. In tears he begged me not to blame him for what had happened; I promised him I would not, and I kept my promise so faithfully that, more than twenty years later, nobody knew what had caused me to have two scarred fingers, for so they have always remained. I was confined to my bed for more than three weeks, and for more than two months I was unable to use my hand, and I always claimed that a big stone had fallen on my fingers and crushed them.
Magnanima menzogna! or quando è il vero
Si bello che si possa a te preporre?*
I was, however, deeply affected by this accident because of the circumstances in which it happened, since it was when the citizens were due to perform their military exercises, and three other boys of my age and I had formed a group with which, wearing my uniform, I was to take part in the exercises with my district’s company. I had the agony of hearing the company drums pass beneath my window with my three friends while I was in bed.
My other story is very similar, though it occurred later in my life.
I was playing a game of mall* at Plain-Palais* with one of my friends, Pleince. We got into a row over the game, we started fighting, and as we fought, he struck me on my bare head with a well-aimed blow of his mallet which, had he been stronger, would have cracked my skull. I instantly fell to the ground. I have never in my life seen anyone so distressed as that poor boy was when he saw the blood flowing through my hair. He thought he had killed me. He flung himself on to me, took me in his arms, and hugged me tightly, weeping and letting out piercing cries. I too embraced him with all my strength, crying like him in a confused state which was not altogether unpleasant. Finally he set about staunching my blood, which was still flowing, and, realizing that our two handkerchiefs were not going to be enough, he took me to his mother, who had a little garden nearby. The good lady nearly fainted when she saw the state I was in. But she was able to retain her strength and tend to my wound, and having washed it thoroughly, she put on it lily flowers soaked in brandy, an excellent vulnerary which is widely used in our country. Her tears and those of her son so touched my heart that for a long time afterwards I looked on her as my mother and on her son as my brother, until eventually I lost sight of them both and gradually forgot them.
I kept this accident as much of a secret as I did the other, and I have had a hundred other similar accidents happen to me during my life which I was not even tempted to talk about in my Confessions, so little was I seeking in that work to draw attention to the good that I felt in my character. No, when I have spoken against the truth as I knew it, it has only ever been in trivial matters, and more because of the difficulty I have in speaking or the pleasure I take in writing than out of my own self-interest or for the good or harm it could do to others. And anyone who reads my Confessions impartially, if that should ever happen, will feel that the admissions I make in that work are more humiliating and more painful to make than admissions of a greater and yet less shameful wrong would be, which I have not made because I have not committed it.*
It follows from all these reflections that my professed truthfulness is based more on feelings of justice and rectitude than on the reality of things, and that I have followed in practice more the moral dictates of my conscience than abstract notions of truth and falsehood. I have often told lots of stories, but I have very rarely lied. By following these principles I have made myself very vulnerable to criticism from others, but I have done nobody any wrong, and I have not laid claim to more advantage than was owing to me. Only in this way, it seems to me, can truth be a virtue. In all other respects it is for us no more than a metaphysical thing which leads to neither good nor evil.
However, my heart does not feel sufficiently satisfied by these distinctions for me to believe myself entirely beyond reproach. In weighing up so carefully what I owed to others, have I adequately considered what I owed to myself? If one has to be fair to others, one must also be true to oneself, for this is a homage that the respectable man must pay to his own dignity. When my lack of small talk forced me to make up for it by telling harmless stories, I was wrong because one should not debase oneself in order to amuse others, and when, swept along by the pleasure of writing, I embellished real things with made-up ornaments, I was yet more wrong, because to decorate truth with fables is in fact to disfigure it.
But what makes me more unforgivable is the motto I had chosen. This motto obliged me more than all other men to commit myself absolutely to truth, and it was not enough for me always to sacrifice to it my interests and desires; rather, I should also have sacrificed to it my weakness and timid nature. I should have had the courage and the strength always to be truthful, on all occasions, and never to allow fictions or fables to pass my lips or come from my pen which was specifically dedicated to truth. This is what I should have told myself when I adopted this proud motto and repeated to myself over and over again as long as I dared to bear it. My lies were never dictated to me by falsehood; they all came through weakness, though that is a very poor excuse. With a weak soul one may at the very most be able to shun vice, but it is arrogant and reckless to dare to profess great virtues.
Such are the reflections which would probably never have occurred to me, had the abbé Rozier not suggested them to me. It is no doubt too late to make use of them; but at least it is not too late to put right my wrong and to control my will: for this is henceforth all that is in my power to do. In this, then, and in all such things, Solon’s maxim is applicable to all ages, and it is never too late to learn, even from one’s enemies, to be wise, truthful, modest, and less presumptuous.
FIFTH WALK
OF all the places where I have lived (and I have lived in some charming ones), none has made me so truly happy or left me such sweet regrets as the Île de St Pierre in the middle of the Lac de Bienne.* This little island, which in Neuchâtel is called the Île de la Motte, is not at all well known, even in Switzerland. No traveller, as far as I know, has ever mentioned it. And yet it is very pleasant and wonderfully situated for the happiness of a man who likes to live within defined limits; for, although I am perhaps the only person in the world to whom destiny has decreed that he should live in this way, I cannot believe that I am the only person to have such a natural inclination for it, although I have so far not come across it in anyone else.
The shores of the Lac de Bienne are wilder and more romantic than those of Lake Geneva because the rocks and woods are closer to the water’s edge; but they are no less pleasing on the eye. There may be fewer cultivated fields and vineyards and fewer towns and houses, but there is also more natural greenery, there are more meadows and shaded woodland hideaways, and more frequent contrasts and sudden changes in the landscape. Since there are no major roads suitable for carriages on these happy shores, the area is little visited by travellers; but how affecting it is for solitary contemplatives who love to lose themselves altogether in the charms of nature and to meditate in a silence unbroken by a
ny sound other than that of the cry of eagles, occasional birdsong, and the rumbling of streams cascading down the mountains. In the middle of this beautiful, almost circular lake are two small islands, the one inhabited and cultivated, and about half a league* in circumference, the other smaller, deserted, and lying fallow, which one day will end up being destroyed by the constant removal of earth from it to make good the damage done to the big island by waves and storms. Thus it is that the substance of the weak is always used to the advantage of the powerful.
There is only one house on the island, but it is large, pleasant, and comfortable, and it belongs, as the island itself does, to the hospital in Bern and is inhabited by a steward, who lives there with his family and servants. He keeps a well-stocked farmyard, an aviary, and fish ponds. For all its smallness, the island is so varied in soil and position that it has all kinds of places suitable for all sorts of things to be grown. It includes fields, vineyards, woodland, orchards, and rich pastures shaded by trees and lined by shrubs of all varieties, all of which are kept watered by the edges of the lake; a raised terrace, planted with two rows of trees, runs the length of the island, and in the middle of this terrace a pretty summerhouse has been built, where the inhabitants of the neighbouring shores gather for dancing on Sundays during the grape harvest.
It is on this island that I took refuge after the stoning at Môtiers.* I found staying there so charming and I lived in a way so compatible with my nature that, resolving to end my days there, I had no concerns other than that I might not be allowed to carry out this plan, which conflicted with the plan to take me off to England, the first signs of which I was already beginning to detect.* Troubled by these forebodings, I could have wished that this refuge would be turned into a lifelong prison, that I would be confined there for the rest of my life, and that, by being stripped of all power and all hope of ever leaving, I would be forbidden any kind of communication with the mainland so that, not knowing anything of what was going on in the outside world, I might forget its existence and it mine.
Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford World's Classics) Page 9
