The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

by Jan Potocki

  From there Hervas returned to the arts of peace and devoted the forty-sixth volume to civil architecture; the forty-seventh to naval architecture; the forty-eighth to shipbuilding; the forty-ninth to navigation.

  Then Hervas turned to man in society and devoted the fiftieth volume to legislation; the fifty-first to civil law; the fifty-second to criminal law; the fifty-third to international law; the fifty-fourth to history and the fifty-fifth to mythology; the fifty-sixth to chronology; the fifty-seventh to biography; the fifty-eighth to archaeology, or the study of antiquity; the fifty-ninth to numismatics; the sixtieth to heraldry; the sixty-first to diplomatics, which is the study of documents; the sixty-second to diplomacy, which is the study of embassies and the art of negotiation; the sixty-third to idiomatology, which is the general study of languages; the sixty-fourth to bibliography, which is the study of books and publishing.

  Then Hervas returned to the arts of thought and dealt with logic in his sixty-fifth volume; rhetoric in the sixty-sixth; ethics, which is moral philosophy, in the sixty-seventh; aesthetics, which is the analysis of the impressions we receive through our senses, in the sixty-eighth.

  Then came the sixty-ninth volume, containing philosophy, which is the study of wisdom in relation to religion; the seventieth contained theology in general, which was then divided into parts: dogmatics in the seventy-first volume; polemics, which is the faculty of considering general points in a discussion, in the seventy-second; ascetics, which teaches the exercise of piety, in the seventy-third. Then, in the seventy-fourth, came exegesis, which is the exposition of Holy Writ; in the seventy-fifth, hermeneutics, which is its interpretation; in the seventy-sixth, scholastics, that is, the art of conducting a proof completely independently of common sense; and in the seventy-seventh, the theology of mysticism or the pantheism of spiritualism.

  From theology, in a transition which looked too daring, Hervas passed to oneirocritics, or the explanation of dreams. This was not the least interesting volume. Hervas demonstrated in it how misleading and irresponsible errors had been allowed to govern the world for many centuries, for we can see from history that the dream of the fat cows and the lean cows changed the constitution of Egypt, whose territorial possessions became at that period royal domains. Five hundred years later we can see Agamemnon telling his dream to the assembly of Greeks. Finally, six centuries after the Trojan war, the Chaldeans of Babylon and the oracle of Delphi were explaining dreams.

  The seventy-ninth volume dealt with ornithomancy, or the science of augury, which is divination by birds, practised principally by the Etruscan haruspices. Seneca recorded their rites for us.

  The eightieth volume, more learned than the rest, went back to the origins of magic, in the time of Zoroaster and Ostanes.2 In it was found the history of that deplorable science which to the shame of our era infected its beginning and has still not altogether been abandoned.

  The eighty-first volume was devoted to the cabbala as well as other means of divination, such as rhabdomancy or divination by wands, hydromancy, geomancy etc.

  From all these lies, Hervas passed suddenly to the incontestable truths. Thus the eighty-second volume was devoted to geometry; the eighty-third to arithmetic; the eighty-fourth to algebra; the eighty-fifth to trigonometry; the eighty-sixth to stereometry, which is the study of solids applied to the cutting of gemstones; the eighty-seventh to geography; the eighty-eighth to astronomy and its false applications, known as astrology; the eighty-ninth to mechanics; the ninetieth to dynamics, the science of living forces; the ninety-first to statics, or forces in equilibrium; the ninety-second to hydraulics; the ninety-third to hydrostatics; the ninety-fourth to hydrodynamics; the ninety-fifth to optics and perspective; the ninety-sixth to dioptrics; the ninety-seventh to catoptrics; the ninety-eighth to analytical geometry; the ninety-ninth to the first principles of differential calculus and the hundredth to analysis, which, according to Hervas, was the science of sciences and marked the extreme limit of human knowledge.

  A deep knowledge of the hundred different sciences may appear to some people to be necessarily beyond the mental powers given to man. But it is certain that Hervas wrote a volume on each which began with the history of the science and finished with reflections full of wisdom on how it might be added to and how the frontiers of knowledge might, as it were, be driven back.

  Hervas was equal to the whole task thanks to an economical use of his time and to a great regularity in its distribution. He would rise with the sun and prepare himself for work in his office by reflections pertaining to the task he had to do there. He would attend the minister half an hour before the rest and would wait for the office hour, pen in hand and his brain free from anything to do with his great work. When the hour struck he would begin his calculations and get through them with amazing speed; then he would go to the bookshop kept by Moreno, whose trust he had been able to gain, would take away the books he needed and carry them home. He would go out again to eat a light meal, return home before one o’clock and work until eight o’clock in the evening. After this he would play pelota3 with small children in the neighbourhood, would go home, consume a cup of chocolate and go to bed. On Sundays he would spend the whole day out, thinking about the work of the coming week. Hervas was thus able to devote about three thousand hours a year to the production of his universal work, which at the end of fifteen years came to forty-five thousand hours, at which point the amazing work was actually finished without anyone in Madrid knowing about it; for Hervas was not at all communicative and spoke to no one about his work, wanting to astonish the world by displaying all at once his vast mass of knowledge.

  Hervas’s work was therefore finished as he completed his thirty-ninth year, and he congratulated himself on entering his fortieth with a great reputation ready to blossom forth. But he felt at the same time a certain sadness, for the habit of work supported by his expectations had been for him a sort of pleasant companion which filled every instant of his day.

  He had lost this companionship, and now boredom, which he had never experienced, began to make itself felt. This state, so new to Hervas, made him act completely out of character. Far from seeking solitude, he was seen everywhere in public places. Once there he would look as though he was going to accost everyone, but knowing no one and not having the habit of conversation, he would go by without saying a word. However, he thought inwardly that soon all Madrid would know him, would seek his company and that his name would be on everyone’s lips.

  Tormented by the need for distraction, Hervas hit on the idea of going back to his birthplace, an obscure village in Asturias which he hoped he would make famous. For fifteen years he had allowed himself no other amusement than playing pelota with the boys of his neighbourhood, and he promised himself the great delight of playing it in the place where he had spent his early childhood.

  Before leaving, Hervas wanted to enjoy the sight of his hundred volumes arranged in a row on a single shelf. He possessed a copy in the same format that the volumes were to have once they had been printed. He gave his manuscripts to a printer, instructing him that the spine of every volume should bear longways the name of the science and the number of the volume, from the first, which was universal grammar, to the hundredth, which was analysis.

  The binder delivered the work three weeks later. The shelf which was to receive it had already been made. Hervas placed the imposing series on it and ceremonially burned all his rough drafts and incomplete copies. Then he double-locked his room, sealed it up and left for Asturias.

  The sight of his birthplace indeed gave Hervas all the pleasure he hoped it would. A host of innocent and sweet memories brought tears of joy to his eyes, whose springs had been dried up by the twenty years of arid thinking. Our polygraph would willingly have spent the rest of his days in his native hamlet but the hundred volumes called him back to Madrid. He took the road to the capital, arrived home, found the seal fixed to the door still intact, opened the door… and saw his hundred volumes torn to pieces,
stripped of their bindings, with all their pages loose and out of order on the floor.

  This terrible sight drove him out of his mind. He fell down amid the debris of his book and even lost all sensation of life.

  Alas! The cause of the disaster was this. Hervas never had meals in his own room. Rats, which are found in such great numbers in all the houses in Madrid, took good care not to visit his, where they would only have found a few quill pens to gnaw at. But that was not the case when a hundred volumes all glued with fresh glue were brought to his room and the room was on the same day abandoned by its master. The rats were attracted by the smell of the glue, emboldened by his absence and came there in great numbers to create chaos, gnawing and devouring.

  On regaining his senses, Hervas saw one of these monsters dragging the last pages of his analysis into a hole. Anger had perhaps never before entered Hervas’s soul, but he then felt a first spasm of it, rushed at the destroyer of his transcendental geometry, struck his head against the wall and fell down unconscious once again.

  Hervas came round a second time, picked up the shreds which covered the floor of his room and put them into a chest. Then he sat on the chest and succumbed to sad thoughts. Soon after, he was seized by shivering which the very next day degenerated into a bilious, comatose, and malignant fever. He was placed in the care of doctors.

  When the gypsy chief had reached this point in his narration he was summoned to join his band, so he put off until the next day the continuation of his story.

  The Fiftieth Day

  The next day the company reassembled and the gypsy chief continued his story as follows:

  THE STORY OF DIEGO HERVAS CONTINUED

  Having been robbed of his glory by rats, and given up by his doctors, Hervas was not however abandoned by his nurse. She continued to care for him, and soon after a crisis with a happy outcome, his life was saved. The nurse was a girl aged thirty years called Marica. She had come to look after him out of the kindness of her heart because he used sometimes to converse in the evening with her father, who was a local cobbler. As Hervas was recovering, he realized all that he owed to this kind girl.

  ‘Marica,’ he said to her, ‘you have saved my days and have smoothed my path back to life. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Señor,’ the girl replied, ‘you can make me happy but I dare not say how.’

  ‘Speak, speak, and rest assured that if it is in my power I shall do it.’

  ‘But suppose I were to ask you to marry me?’

  ‘I will do so very willingly. You will feed me when I am well, look after me when I am sick and protect my work from rats in my absence. Yes, Marica, I will marry you whenever you want and the sooner that is, the better.’

  While still not completely restored to health, Hervas opened the chest which contained the debris of his polymathesis. He tried to put the single sheets back together again and suffered a relapse which left him very weak. When he was strong enough to go out he went to see the minister of finance, and pointed out that he had worked for fifteen years; he had trained pupils who were capable of replacing him, and his health was ruined. He asked to be allowed to retire with a pension equivalent to half his salary. In Spain it is not difficult to obtain these sorts of favours; Hervas was granted what he wanted and married Marica.

  Our scholar then changed his way of life. He took lodgings in a quiet part of town and vowed not to leave them until he had reconstructed the manuscript of his hundred volumes. The rats had nibbled away the paper which was stuck to the spines of the books, leaving only the other half of each page; and even that half was torn to shreds; but they enabled Hervas to recall the whole text. In this way he set about rewriting the whole work. At the same time he produced one of quite another kind, for Marica brought me into the world: me, a sinner and a reprobate. Oh, surely on the day of my birth there was rejoicing in hell! The eternal fires of that awful place blazed with a new intensity, and the demons there increased the torments of the damned so as to revel all the more in their wailing.

  As he uttered these words, the pilgrim seemed to succumb to despair. He shed many tears and then, turning to Cornádez, said:

  ‘I am unable today to continue my story. Come back here tomorrow at the same time and be sure to do so without fail, for your salvation depends on it.’

  Cornádez returned home, his soul filled with new terrors. That night he was woken by the dead Peña Flor, who counted the hundred doubloons in his ears without a single coin missing from the count.

  The next day he went to the gardens of the Celestine fathers. There he found the pilgrim, who continued his story as follows:

  I was born, and my mother survived my birth by only a few hours. Hervas had never known love or friendship except through a definition of these two emotions which he had included in the sixty-seventh volume. The loss of his wife showed him that he had been born to feel friendship and love. It distressed him more than the loss of his hundred volumes that the rats had devoured. Hervas’s house was small and every cry that I gave reverberated right through it. It was clearly not possible to keep me there. I was taken in by my grandfather, Marañon, who seemed very flattered to have his grandson, the son of a contador and a gentleman, in his house. For all his humble estate, my grandfather was very comfortably off. He sent me to school as soon as I was old enough to go. When I reached the age of sixteen years he gave me elegant clothes and the wherewithal to wander about at my leisure in Madrid. He thought himself well rewarded for his outlay as he could say, ‘Mi nieto, el hijo del contador.’1 But let us turn to my father and his sad fate, which is all too well known. May it serve as a lesson and a terrible warning to the ungodly!

  Diego Hervas spent eight years repairing the damage done by the rats. His work was nearly complete when foreign journals which fell into his hands revealed to him that great progress had been made in the sciences, without his knowledge. Hervas sighed at this increase in his labours but, not wishing to leave his work in an imperfect state, he added to every science the discoveries which had been made. This took him four years, so he spent twelve years without leaving his house, glued to his work nearly all the time. This sedentary life finally destroyed his health. He suffered from chronic sciatica, kidney pains, gravel in the bladder and all of the early symptoms of gout. But at last the polymathesis in a hundred volumes was complete. Hervas summoned Moreno the bookseller – the son of the Moreno who had put on sale his ill-fated Analysis – to his house.

  ‘Señor,’ he said. ‘Here are a hundred volumes which contain all that men presently know. This Polymathesis will bring honour to your presses and, if I may say so, to Spain. I want nothing for myself, but I beg you of your charity to print my work so that my historic labours will not be entirely lost.’

  Moreno opened all the volumes, examined them carefully and then said, ‘Señor, I will undertake the work, but you must bring yourself to reduce it to twenty-five volumes.’

  ‘Go away, go away!’ replied Hervas in the deepest indignation. ‘Go back to your shop and print the romantic or pedantic rubbish which are the shame of Spain! Leave me, Señor, with my kidney stones and my genius, which if it had been better known would have won general esteem. I have nothing left to ask of mankind and still less of booksellers. Go away!’

  Moreno withdrew and Hervas fell into the blackest of melancholy. He constantly kept in his sight his hundred volumes, the children of his genius, conceived in rapture, born of pain mingled with pleasure and now consigned to oblivion. He saw his whole life wasted, his present and future existence destroyed. It was then also that his mind, trained to understand all the mysteries of nature, unfortunately turned to the abyss of human misery. By measuring its depth he saw only evil everywhere, and said in his heart, ‘Who are you, author of evil?’

  He was himself filled with horror at this thought and decided to investigate whether evil, to exist, must have been created. Then he examined the same question in a broader context. He turned his attention to natural forces and attr
ibuted to matter an energy which seemed to him to have the property of explaining everything without having to have recourse to the Creation.

  As far as animals and men were concerned, they owed their existence, according to him, to a generative acid which by making matter ferment, gave it constant forms, in more or less the same way that acids crystallize alkaline and earthy bases in polyhedra which are always the same. He considered fungus substances produced by wet wood as the link connecting the crystallization of fossils to the reproduction of plants and animals, indicating if not their identity then at least the analogy between them.

  Learned as he was, Hervas had no trouble supporting his false system with sophistical proofs designed to lead men’s minds astray. He found for example that mules, which are a mixture of two species, could be compared to salts with a mixed base whose crystallization is of a compound type. The effervescence produced by mixing some earths with acid appeared to him to be comparable to the fermentation of mucous tissue in plants; according to him this constituted the beginnings of life that had not been able to develop due to lack of propitious circumstances.

  Hervas had observed that crystals as they formed accumulated in the lightest parts of the test-tube and were difficult to form in darkness. And as light is equally favourable to vegetable growth, he considered luminous fluid to be one of the elements of which the universal acid, which gave life to all nature, consisted. Besides, he had seen light turn blue-coloured paper red over a period of time, and that was another reason for considering it to be an acid.