by Jan Potocki
Jacques Bernouilli died at the moment of winning an absolute victory and his brother remained master of the field of battle. My father clearly saw that he was wrong to consider only two elements of the curve but he did not want to prolong a war which had so upset the scientific community. Meanwhile Jean Bernouilli could not endure living in peace. He declared war first on the Marquis de l’Hospital,5 whose discoveries he claimed as his own, and later attacked Newton himself. The subject of these new battles was infinitesimal calculus, which Leibniz had discovered at the same time as Newton and which all England had made into a national issue.
In this way my father spent the best years of his life watching from afar the great battles fought by the greatest minds of the world, with the sharpest weapons the spirit of mankind has ever forged.
The love which my father had for the exact sciences did not however make him neglect the others. The rocks of Ceuta harbour many marine creatures which have much in common with the nature of plants and which form a sort of bridge between these two great realms. My father always kept some of these creatures confined in specimen jars and took delight in observing the marvels of their organisms. He also had with him a library of Latin books, or books translated into Latin, which he considered as historical sources. He had made this collection with the intention of supporting with empirical evidence the principles of probability developed by Bernouilli in his book entitled Ars Conjectandi.
So my father, living the life of the mind, passed in turn from observation to meditation, nearly always confined to his residence. The continual efforts to which he subjected his intellect made him often forget that cruel period of his life when his reason had given way under the weight of his misfortunes. But often, too, the past would claim its due. This would occur mostly in the evenings, after the labours of the day had exhausted his mind. Then, since he was not used to seeking distractions outside his own company, he would climb up to the terrace and look across the sea to the horizon, edged in the distance by the coasts of Spain. This view reminded him of those glorious and happy days when he was cherished by his family, loved by his mistress, admired by men of worth, and his soul, burning with the fire of youth and lit by the wisdom of a mature intellect, opened itself to all those feelings that are the delight of human life and all those thoughts that dignify the human spirit.
Then he remembered his brother robbing him of his mistress, his fortune and his rank and himself lying on the straw, deprived of his reason. Sometimes he took up his violin and played the fatal saraband which decided Blanca in favour of Carlos. This music provoked him to tears. When he had cried he felt relief. Fifteen years went by in this manner.
One evening the Lieutenant-Governor of Ceuta, having some business to transact with my father, visited him quite late and found him in one of his melancholy moods. Having thought for a moment, he said, ‘My dear commandant, I beg you to pay attention to me. You are unhappy and you are sorrowful. That is no secret. We know it and so does my daughter. She was five when you came to Ceuta and since then not a day has passed without her hearing you spoken of with adoration, for you are the tutelary deity of our little colony. Often she has said to me, “Our dear commandant only feels his sorrows so deeply because he has no one to share them with.” Come and see us, Don Enrique. It will do you more good than counting the waves of the sea.’
So my father let himself be taken to Inés de Cadanza. He married her six months later, and I was born ten months after their marriage.
When the weak child that I was first saw the light of day, my father took me in his arms, raised his eyes to heaven and said, ‘Oh almighty power, whose exponent is immensity, oh last term of all ascending series, oh my God, behold another sensible being projected into space. If he is destined to be as unhappy as his father may you in your mercy mark him with the sign of subtraction.’
Having thus prayed, my father kissed me passionately and said, ‘No, my poor child, you will not be as unhappy as I have been. I swear by the holy name of God that I will never teach you mathematics but you will know the saraband, the ballets of Louis XIV and every other form of impertinence which comes to my attention.’ Then my father bathed me in his tears and gave me back to the midwife.
Now I beg you to note the strangeness of my fate. My father swears never to teach me mathematics and swears to teach me to dance. Well, the reverse happened. It has turned out that I know a great deal about the exact sciences and I am incapable of learning, I won’t say the saraband because that’s no longer in fashion, but any other dance. In fact, I cannot conceive how one can remember the steps of the quadrille. There are indeed no dance steps which are produced by a point of origin whose sequence is governed by a consistent rule. They cannot be represented by formulas and it seems inconceivable to me that there are people who can retain them in their memory.
As Don Pedro de Velásquez reached this point in his story, the gypsy chief came into the cave and said that it was in the interests of the band to move on and retire further into the Alpujarras mountains.
‘Capital,’ said the cabbalist. ‘We’ll meet up with the Wandering Jew all the sooner and, as he is not allowed to rest, he will come along with us on our journey and we will have all the more pleasure from conversing with him. He has witnessed much. No one can have experienced more than he.’
Then the gypsy chief turned to Velásquez and said, ‘And you, Señor caballero, do you want to stay with us or would you prefer to be escorted to a nearby town?’
Velásquez thought for a moment and then said, ‘I left some papers next to the mean bed where I slept the day before yesterday, before waking up under the gallows where this gentleman who is a captain in the Walloon Guards found me. Please send to the Venta Quemada. If I have not got my papers there is no point in my continuing on my journey. I shall have to go back to Ceuta. But while you are sending someone back to the venta I can still travel along with you.’
‘All my people are at your service,’ said the gypsy. ‘I’ll send some of them to the venta and they will catch us up when we next pitch camp.’
Everyone packed up. We covered six leagues and passed the night on a remote mountain top.
The Twentieth Day
We spent the morning waiting for those whom the gypsy chief had sent to the venta to fetch Velásquez’s papers. Prompted by an idleness which I believe to be natural to all the human race, we stared down the path along which they were to come. All except Velásquez who, having found on the hillside a slate slab polished by the action of the water, had covered it with x’s, y’s and z’s. When he had had his fill of calculations he turned to us and asked us why we were impatient. We told him that it was because his papers hadn’t yet arrived. He replied that it was very good of us to be impatient on his behalf and that he would wait impatiently with us once he had finished his calculations. Then he completed his equation and asked us what we were waiting for, and why we weren’t leaving.
‘Good Lord,’ said the cabbalist to Señor Don de Velásquez the geometer, ‘if you don’t yourself know the feeling of impatience you must have observed it occasionally in those with whom you have had dealings.’
‘That is so,’ replied Velásquez. ‘I have often observed impatience in others, and it seems to me to be a feeling of unease which never ceases growing, without there appearing to be any law that governs its growth. One may say, however, that in general terms it is in inverse ratio to the square of the force of inertia. So that if I am twice as difficult to move to impatience as you are, I will only suffer one degree of it at the end of the first hour while you will suffer four. The same applies to all the emotions which can be looked on as motive forces.’
‘It seems,’ said Rebecca, ‘that you perfectly understand the springs of the human heart and that geometry is the surest way to achieve happiness.’
‘Señora,’ said Velásquez, ‘the pursuit of happiness can, it seems to me, be compared to the solution of a quadratic or cubic equation. You know the last term and you know tha
t it is the product of all the roots, but before having exhausted all the divisors you reach a certain number of imaginary roots. Meanwhile the day goes by and you have had the pleasure of engaging in calculation. The same is true of human life. You also reach imaginary quantities which you have taken for real values. But in the meantime you have lived and moreover acted. Now activity is a universal law of nature. Nothing is at rest. This rock seems to be at rest because the ground on which it rests opposes a force to it greater than the pressure it exerts. But if you put your foot on this rock you will soon see how it acts.’
‘But,’ said Rebecca, ‘can you submit the movement which we call love to calculation? It is claimed, for example, that with familiarity love grows smaller in men and it grows greater in women. Can you tell me why?’
‘The problem that you have set me, Señora,’ said Velásquez, ‘presupposes that one of the two loves grows and the other diminishes. So that there will necessarily be a moment when the two lovers love each other equally, one in exactly the same degree as the other. In this way the problem can be brought under the rule of maxima and minima and can be represented by a curve. I have thought up a very elegant proof for problems of this kind. Let x…’
As Velásquez reached this point in his analysis, the men sent to the venta came into sight. They brought with them papers which Velásquez examined carefully, after which he said, ‘All my papers are here with the exception of one, which in fact is not very important but with which I was busy the night I was taken to lie under the gallows. It doesn’t matter, let me not hold you up.’
So we did in fact go on. We travelled for part of the day, then stopped and assembled in the gypsy chief’s tent. After eating supper, we asked him to continue the story of his life, which he did as follows:
THE GYPSY CHIEF’S STORY CONTINUED
You had left me in the company of the terrible viceroy, who was deigning to tell me about his wealth.
*
‘Whom I well remember,’ said Velásquez. ‘His fortune amounted to sixty million, twenty-five thousand, one hundred and sixty-one piastres.’
‘Splendid!’ said the gypsy, and carried on with his story.
If the viceroy had frightened me when I first saw him, he frightened me even more when I learned that he had been decorated by a serpent, pricked into him with a needle, that went round his body sixteen times and ended on the toe of his left foot. So I didn’t pay much attention to what he said about the state of his worldly affairs. But that wasn’t the case with Aunt Torres. She summoned up all of her courage and said to the viceroy, ‘Your Excellency, your fortune is no doubt very big, but that of this young lady must also be considerable.
‘Señora,’ replied the viceroy. ‘The Conde de Rovellas’s prodigality had eaten a long way into his fortune. And although I took upon myself all the costs of the action, I was only able to retrieve the following from what he left: sixteen plantations on San Domingo, twenty-two shares in the San Lugar silver-mine, twelve in the Philippines Company, fifty-six in the Asiento Bank and some minor effects, the total sum amounting to twenty-seven million piastres fortes more or less.’
Then the viceroy summoned his secretary and had brought to him a casket made of precious wood from the Indies. Then he knelt and said to me, ‘Charming daughter of a mother whom my heart still adores, be so gracious as to receive the fruit of thirteen years’ effort. For it has taken me all that time to extract this wealth from the hands of your greedy collateral relatives.’
At first I wanted to take the casket with a gracious and tender air, but the idea of having at my feet a man who had smashed the heads of so many Indians, or perhaps the shame of having to play a part which was alien to my sex, or some other emotion, made me nearly faint. But Aunt Torres, whose courage had been considerably bolstered by the twenty-seven million piastres, supported me in her arms, seized the casket with a gesture which betrayed a certain greed and said to the viceroy, ‘Señor, this young girl has never seen a man kneeling before her. I beg you to allow her to withdraw to her apartment.’
Once there, we double-locked the door and Aunt Torres gave herself over to raptures of joy, kissing the casket again and again and thanking heaven that Elvira would have not only a safe but also a brilliant future.
A moment later, there was a knock at the door. We saw the count’s secretary enter with a notary, who made an inventory of the papers contained in the casket and required Maria de Torres to give a receipt for them. He added that as I was a minor my signature was not necessary.
Then my aunts and I once again shut ourselves in. ‘Señoras,’ I said. ‘Elvira’s future is secure but how are we going to get the bogus Elvira de Rovellas admitted to the Theatine College? And where are we going to find the real one?’
No sooner had I uttered these words than the two ladies heaved many a sigh of woe, with Señora Dalanosa picturing me already suffering the whip and Maria de Torres fearing for her niece and her son, hapless children who were exposed to so many dangers of different kinds, wandering in the world without guidance or support. Each went sorrowfully to bed. I thought for a long time about how to extract myself from my predicament. I could have fled but the viceroy would have sent people after me in all directions. I fell asleep without having thought of anything. We were then only a day away from Burgos. The part I was to play there caused me great anxiety; however, I had to step once more into my litter and the viceroy took again to parading alongside it, softening from time to time the habitual severity of his features with tender expressions which made me feel very uneasy.
In this manner we reached the deep shade of a watering-place, where we found that refreshments had been laid out for us by the citizens of Burgos.
The viceroy handed me down from my litter. But rather than lead me to the meal he took me aside, sat me down in the shade, seated himself next to me and said, ‘Charming Elvira, the more that I have the good fortune to be near you, the more I am convinced that heaven has intended you to gild the evening of a stormy life dedicated to the good of my country and the glory of my king. I have secured the possession of the archipelago of the Philippines for Spain. I have discovered half of New Mexico. I have brought the turbulent Inca people back to the path of duty. I have had ceaselessly to fight for my life against stormy seas, the inclement weather of the equator and the deadly fumes from the mines I have had opened up. Who will compensate me for this number of years, the best years of my life? I could devote them to retirement, to agreeable pleasures, to friendship and to other sweet feelings. But perhaps the King of Spain and the Indies, powerful though he is, is not powerful enough to give me this reward. But you, adorable Elvira, this reward is in your power. With your fate united to mine, I could wish for nothing else, passing my days with no other occupation than to be attentive to your dear heart’s desires. I should be made happy by a single smile and transported with ecstasy at the tiniest sign of affection it may please you to grant me.
‘The idea of this peaceful future coming after the turmoil of my past life has so captivated me that this very night I took the decision to bring forward the moment when you will be mine. So I shall leave you now, fair Elvira. But only to go on to Burgos, where you will witness the effects of my impatience.’
After these words the viceroy knelt before me, kissed my hands, remounted and galloped off.
I do not need to tell you what sort of anguish I felt. I anticipated the most unpleasant scenes, and this desperate prospect would always end in the whipping which I would not fail to undergo in the Theatines’ courtyard. I rejoined my aunts, who were eating their meal. I wanted to tell them of the viceroy’s latest declaration but there was no way of doing so. The inexorable major-domo urged me to step back into the litter and I had to obey.
At the gates of Burgos we were met by one of my future husband’s pages, who told us that we were expected at the bishop’s palace. Icy beads of sweat which I felt running down my forehead told me that I was still alive, for in all other respects fear had pl
unged me into a state of prostration from which I did not emerge until I found myself in front of the archbishop. The prelate was sitting in an armchair opposite the viceroy. His clergy were placed below him. The leading citizens of Burgos were sitting next to the viceroy. At the other end of the room there stood an altar dressed for the ceremony. The archbishop rose, blessed me and kissed me on the forehead.
Overcome by all the emotions that welled up in my heart, I fell at the archbishop’s feet, and at that moment I don’t know what presence of mind inspired me to say to him, ‘Your Grace, have pity on me! I want to become a nun! I want to become a nun!’
After making this declaration, which rang throughout the room, I thought it proper to faint. I only recovered to fall into the arms of my aunts, who were finding it difficult not to collapse themselves, such was their distress. Through half-closed eyes I could see the archbishop standing respectfully in front of the viceroy, waiting for him to make his mind up what to do.
The viceroy asked the archbishop to sit down again and to give him time to reflect. As the archbishop therefore sat down, I could again see the face of my august lover, whose expression was even more severe than usual. It would have caused the boldest to quake. For some time he seemed absorbed in his thoughts, then he proudly got to his feet, put on his hat and said, ‘I shall no longer remain incognito, I am the Viceroy of Mexico. The archbishop may remain seated.’ All the other persons present rose to their feet respectfully.
‘Señores,’ said the viceroy, ‘fourteen years ago vile slanderers accused me of being the father of this young person. I could think of no other way of silencing them than to engage myself to marry her once she should have reached the requisite age. While she grew in grace and virtue the king, acknowledging my services, caused me to rise in rank and eventually clothed me in the high dignity which has brought me close to the throne. Meanwhile the time to fulfil my promise had come. I asked the king for permission to return to Spain and to marry. The reply of the council of Madrid was that I could come but that I would not be given the honour due to a viceroy unless I gave up the idea of marriage. At the same time I was forbidden to come within fifty leagues of Madrid. I understood clearly that I had to give up the idea of marriage or renounce my master’s favour. But I had promised and I did not even hesitate.
