MASTER: Well, Jacques, why did you sidetrack me then?…
Did you ever notice a little child at Desglands’ château?
JACQUES: A wicked, stubborn insolent little valetudinarian? Yes, I saw him.
MASTER: He is the natural son of Desglands and the beautiful widow.
JACQUES: That child will cause him a lot of sorrow. He was an only child, which is good enough reason to be a scoundrel. He knew he was going to be rich, which is another good reason to be just a scoundrel.
MASTER: And since he is a valetudinarian, no one can teach him anything or dares to annoy him or contradict him on anything, which is a third good reason to be just a scoundrel.
JACQUES: One night the little lunatic started uttering the most awful cries. The whole house was in uproar. Everybody ran to him. He wanted his father to get up.
‘Your father’s sleeping.’
‘It doesn’t matter. He must get up. I want it. I want it.’
‘He is ill.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I want him to get up. I want it. I want it.’
They woke up Desglands. He threw his dressing-gown over his shoulders and arrived.
‘Well, my little man, here I am. What do you want?’
‘I want you to make them come.’
‘Who?’
‘Everyone in the château.’
He made them come, masters, valets, guests, all the other habitués of the place, Jeanne, Denise, me with my bad knee, everybody except for one old crippled concierge who had been given a place of retirement in a cottage about a half a mile from the château. He wanted her to be fetched.
‘But, my child, it is midnight.’
‘I want it, I want it.’
‘You know that she lives a long way away.’
‘I want it. I want it.’
‘And that she’s very old and hardly able to walk.’
‘I want it. I want it.’
JACQUES: The poor concierge had to come. She was carried, because she would as soon have eaten the road there as walked it. When we were all assembled he wanted to be got up and dressed. Then when he was up and dressed he wanted us all to go into the great drawing-room and he wanted to be put in the middle of us in his papa’s great armchair. When that was done he wanted us all to take each other by the hand, which we did, and then we had to dance around him, and so we all started to dance around him. But it is the rest which is incredible…
MASTER: I hope you’ll spare me the rest.
JACQUES: No, Monsieur, you will listen to the rest. If he thinks he can paint me a portrait four yards long with impunity…
MASTER: Jacques, I spoil you.
JACQUES: Too bad for you.
MASTER: You are cross about that long boring portrait of the widow, but I think you have paid me back sufficiently with the long boring story of the child’s whims.
JACQUES: If that’s your opinion carry on with his father’s story, but no more portraits, Master. I hate portraits to death.
MASTER: Why do you hate portraits?
JACQUES: Because they are so unlifelike that if, by chance, one happens to meet the subjects, one does not recognize them. Tell me facts, repeat words to me faithfully, and then I will know what kind of man I am dealing with. One word, one gesture, has sometimes taught me more than the gossip of an entire town.
MASTER: One day Desglands…
JACQUES: When you are away I sometimes go into your library and take down a book, which is normally a history book.
MASTER: One day Desglands…
JACQUES: I skip all the portraits.
MASTER: One day Desglands…
JACQUES: Forgive me, Master. The mechanism was wound up and had to carry on until it had run down.
MASTER: Has it?
JACQUES: It has.
MASTER: One day Desglands invited the beautiful widow to dinner, together with a few neighbouring gentlemen. The reign of Desglands was in its decline and among his guests there was one towards whom the inconstant widow was beginning to be attracted. At table, Desglands and his rival were sitting next to each other opposite the beautiful widow. Desglands used all his wit to enliven the conversation. He addressed the most gallant remarks to the widow but she was distracted, paid no attention to him and continued to stare at his rival. Desglands was holding a fresh egg in his hand when he was overcome by a convulsive movement occasioned by jealousy. He clenched his fist and the next moment there was the egg squeezed from its shell and plastered all over the face of his neighbour, who made a movement with his hand. Desglands grabbed his wrist, stopped him and said in his ear: ‘Monsieur, I consider the blow to have been struck.’
Then there was a profound silence. The beautiful widow felt ill. The meal was sad and brief. On leaving table the widow called Desglands and his rival into a separate room. She did everything which a woman could decently do to reconcile them. She begged, she cried, she fainted, quite genuinely. She clasped Desglands’ hands, she turned to his rival with tears in her eyes.
To him she said: ‘You love me.’
To the other she said: ‘And you have loved me.’
To both of them: ‘And you want to ruin me, to make me the scandal of the whole province, hated and despised by all! Whichever of the two of you takes the life of his enemy, I will never see him again. He can be neither my friend nor my lover and I vow that I will hate him until my dying day.’
Then she swooned again and as she swooned she said: ‘Cruel men. Draw your swords and plunge them into my breast. If I see your arms around each other when I die, I will die without regret.’
Desglands and his rival stood motionless or helped her and a few tears fell from their eyes. The time finally came to part and the beautiful widow was taken back to her house more dead than alive.
JACQUES: Well, Monsieur! Why did I need the portrait you painted of this woman? Don’t I now know everything mentioned in the portrait?
MASTER: The next day Desglands went to visit his fickle charmer and found his rival there. Mistress and rival were both surprised when they saw Desglands’ entire right cheek covered with a large circle of black taffeta.
‘What’s that?’ asked the widow.
DESGLANDS: Nothing.
HIS RIVAL: A gumboil.
DESGLANDS: It will go away.
After a moment’s conversation, Desglands went, and on his way out he gave his rival a sign which was clearly understood. The latter followed him downstairs and they each went a different way down the street. They met behind the gardens of the beautiful widow where they fought. Desglands’ rival was left lying on the field seriously, but not mortally, wounded. While he was being carried back to his house, Desglands returned to the widow’s house. He sat down and they spoke again of the incident the day before. She asked him the significance of the enormous and ridiculous patch covering his cheek. He got up and looked at himself in the mirror. Indeed, he said to her, he did find it a little too big. Then he took a pair of scissors from the lady and took off the spot, made it a stitch or two smaller all round, put it back on again, and said to the widow: ‘How do you find me now?’
‘A stitch or two less ridiculous than before.’
‘Well, that’s something anyway.’
Desglands’ rival got better. There was a second duel, victory again falling to Desglands; this happened again five or six times in a row. After every combat, Desglands reduced the size of his taffeta spot a little by trimming the edge down and put the rest back on his cheek.
JACQUES: And how did this little adventure end? When they carried me into Desglands’ château my recollection is that he no longer had his black spot.
MASTER: No. The end of this adventure was the end of the beautiful widow. The long sorrow which it caused her completed the ruin of her weak and delicate health.
JACQUES: And Desglands?
MASTER: One day while we were out walking together he received a note which he opened and said: ‘He was a very brave man, but I am unable to feel upset at his
death…’, and at that moment he tore from his cheek the remainder of the black circle which his frequent trimmings had almost reduced to the size of an ordinary patch. That is the story of Desglands. Is Jacques happy now? Might I now hope that he will either listen to the story of my loves or carry on again with the story of his own?
JACQUES: Neither.
MASTER: And why not?
JACQUES: Because it is hot, I am tired, this place is charming, and we will be shaded under these trees, where we will be able to rest in the cool air at the side of the stream.
MASTER: I agree, but what about your cold?
JACQUES: It is a hot cold and doctors do say that things are cured by their opposites.
MASTER: Which is true in matters moral as well as physical. I have noticed something quite peculiar. It is that there are hardly any moral maxims which could not be turned into medical aphorisms, and reciprocally hardly any medical aphorisms which could not be turned into moral maxims.
JACQUES: That has to be so.
They got down from their horses and stretched out on the grass. Jacques said to his master: ‘Are you watching? Or are you sleeping? If you watch I will sleep. If you sleep I will watch.’
His master said to him: ‘Sleep, sleep.’
‘Can I count on it that you will watch, because this time we could have two horses stolen?’
His master took out his watch and snuff-box. Jacques prepared himself to sleep but every other second he kept waking up with a start, beating his two hands against each other in the air.
His master asked him: ‘What the devil are you doing?’
JACQUES: I’m trying to get the flies and the midges. I wish somebody would tell me what’s the use of these irritating creatures.
MASTER: Just because you don’t know you think they’re useless, do you? Nature made nothing useless or superfluous.
JACQUES: I can believe that because if something is it has to be.
MASTER: When you have too much blood or bad blood what do you do? You call a surgeon who relieves you of two or three basins of it. Well then! These gnats which you are complaining about are a cloud of little winged surgeons who come with their little lancets to sting you and draw off your blood drop by drop.
JACQUES: Yes, but at random, without knowing whether I’ve got too much or too little. Bring some starving wretch here and see if your little winged surgeons don’t sting him. They are concerned with themselves. Everything in nature is concerned with itself, and with itself only. If it is harmful to others, then so what, as long as the thing is all right itself…
Next he beat the air again with both hands and said: ‘The devil with your little winged surgeons!’
MASTER: Do you know the fable of Garo?72
JACQUES: Yes.
MASTER: What do you think of it?
JACQUES: Bad.
MASTER: That’s easily said.
JACQUES: And easily proved. What if oak trees had pumpkins instead of acorns? Would that fool Garo have gone to sleep under an oak tree then? And if he hadn’t fallen asleep under an oak tree, what difference would it have made to the safety of his nose if pumpkins or acorns fell from it? Give that to your children to read.
MASTER: A philosopher with the same name as you will not have that.
JACQUES: Well, everyone has his own opinion and Jean-Jacques is not Jacques.73
MASTER: Well, too bad for Jacques.
JACQUES: Who can tell unless he has read the last word on the last line on the page which he occupies on the great scroll?
MASTER: What are you thinking?
JACQUES: I am thinking that, although you were speaking to me and I was answering you, you were speaking without wanting to and I was answering without wanting to.
MASTER: And?
JACQUES: And? That we are nothing but two living and thinking machines.
MASTER: Well, at this moment what do you want?
JACQUES: My God, that doesn’t make any difference. That only brings one more function of the two machines into play.
MASTER: What function is that?
JACQUES: May the devil take me if I can conceive of any function operating without a cause. My Captain used to say: ‘Suppose a cause and an effect will follow. From a weak cause, a weak effect. From a momentary cause a momentary effect, from an intermittent cause an intermittent effect, from an impeded cause a reduced effect, from a cause that ceases a nil effect.’
MASTER: But it seems to me that I can sense within me that I am free in the same way that I sense that I think.
JACQUES: My Captain used to say: ‘That may be true at this moment when you do not want to do anything, but what if you wanted to throw yourself off your horse?’
MASTER: I’d throw myself off.
JACQUES: Happily, without repugnance, without effort, as when you dismount at the door of an inn?
MASTER: Not exactly, but what does it matter so long as I throw myself off, and prove that I am free?
JACQUES: My Captain used to say: ‘What! Can you not see that were it not for my contradiction you would never have taken it into your head to break your neck. It is therefore me who takes you by the foot and throws you out of your saddle. If your fall proves something it is not that you are free but that you are mad…’ My Captain also used to say that the enjoyment of freedom which could be exercised without any motivation would be the real hallmark of a maniac.
MASTER: That is all too much for me. But in spite of your Captain and in spite of you, I believe that I want when I want.
JACQUES: But if you are now and have always been the master of your will, why don’t you want to make love to some old bag at this moment, and why did you not stop loving Agathe all the times that you wanted to? My Master, one spends three quarters of one’s life wanting without doing.
MASTER: That is true.
JACQUES: And doing without wanting to.
MASTER: Will you demonstrate that to me?
JACQUES: If you consent to it.
MASTER: I consent.
JACQUES: Then it will be done, but let us speak of other things…
After this nonsense and a few other words of the same importance they were silent and Jacques pushed up his enormous hat, which was an umbrella in bad weather, a parasol in hot weather and a hat in all weathers, the shadowy sanctuary under which one of the best brains which has ever existed would consult destiny on great occasions… When the edges of his hat were raised up his face was more or less in the middle of his body. When they were turned down he could hardly see ten feet in front of him, which had given him the habit of walking with his nose in the air and it is because of this that one could say of his hat: Os illi sublime didit, caelumque tueri/Jussit, et erectos ad sidere tollere vultus…74
And so, as Jacques pushed up his enormous hat, looking far and wide around him, he saw a farmer who was belabouring one of the two horses harnessed to his plough, apparently to no effect. This horse, which was young and vigorous, had lain down in the furrow, and no matter how much the farmer shook his bridle, begged him, caressed him, threatened him, swore at him and beat him, the animal stayed stock still and stubbornly refused to get up.
After Jacques had mused for a while on this scene he turned to his master, whose attention had similarly been attracted.
JACQUES: Do you know what is happening over there, Monsieur?
MASTER: What would you wish to be happening over there other than what I already see?
JACQUES: Can you really not guess?
MASTER: No, but what’s your guess?
JACQUES: My guess is, that there stupid proud useless animal is a town-dweller and because he is proud of his first condition as a saddle horse he despises the plough, and, in a word, it is your horse and also the symbol of Jacques here and so many other faint-hearted wretches like him who have left the countryside to go and bear livery in the capital and who would prefer to beg their bread in the streets or die of hunger than to return to agriculture, the most useful and honourable of occupa
tions.
The master started to laugh, and Jacques, speaking to the farmer, who could not hear him, said: ‘Poor devil. Beat him, beat him as much as you want. He’s set in his ways now and you’ll wear out more than one cracker on your whip before you inspire a little true dignity and some taste for work in that good-for-nothing…’
His master carried on laughing and Jacques, half out of impatience, and half out of pity, got up and walked over toward the farmer. He hadn’t gone two hundred paces when he turned round to his master and started shouting: ‘Monsieur, come here, come here. It’s your horse, it’s your horse!’
And it was indeed. Hardly had the animal recognized Jacques and his master when he got up of his own accord, shook his mane, whinneyed, reared and tenderly nuzzled his companion’s muzzle.
Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master Page 29
