Great French Short Stories

by Paul Negri

  “‘Certainly, if you like, I assure you it won’t be very pleasant. The dampness down there is terrible. The gunpowder is stored under the left wing and we can’t get in without a special pass. On the right, are the water mains and raw saltpeter, and in the center, the countermines and galleries. Do you know what a vault is like?’

  “‘Never mind. I’m curious to see where so many sinister encounters took place, and where you yourself, I am told, were once in mortal danger.’

  “‘He won’t spare me a single vault,’ thought Desroches. ‘This way, then, Brother; this gallery leads to the postern.’

  “The light from the lantern flickered dismally on the musty walls, and glinted here and there on rusty sword blades and gun barrels.

  “‘What weapons are these?’ asked Wilhelm.

  “‘Spoils from the Prussians killed in the last attack. My friends hung them here as trophies.’

  “‘Then several Prussians were killed here?’

  “‘A great many, where these passages meet.’

  “‘Didn’t you kill a sergeant here, a tall elderly man with a red mustache ?’

  “‘Yes, did I tell you about it?’

  “‘No, but at dinner last night I was told of that exploit . . . you so modestly kept from us.’

  “‘What’s the matter, Brother? Why are you so pale?’

  “‘Don’t call me Brother, but enemy! Look, I am a Prussian! I am the son of the sergeant you murdered!’

  “‘Murdered!’

  “‘Or killed! Does it matter? See, here’s where your sword went in.’

  “Wilhelm threw back his cloak and pointed to a tear in his father’s green uniform, which he had reverently kept and was now wearing.

  “‘You—the son of that sergeant! For God’s sake, tell me you’re only joking!’

  “‘Joking! Who would make jokes about a frightful deed like that? My father was killed here; his noble blood reddened these stones; perhaps this was his very sword! Come now, take another, and give me my revenge. . . . Come, this is no duel, it’s German against Frenchman! En garde!’

  “‘My dear Wilhelm, have you lost your mind? Put down that rusty sword. You want to kill me—is it really my fault?’

  “‘You have a chance to kill me, too. Come on, defend yourself!’

  “‘Wilhelm! Kill me as I am, unarmed. I’m going mad; my head’s spinning. Wilhelm! I did what every soldier has to do. Just think! And besides, I’m your sister’s husband—she loves me. Oh no! It’s impossible!’

  “‘My sister! . . . Yes, and that’s the best reason there is why one of us has to die! My sister! She knows everything, and will never again set eyes on the man who made her an orphan. Your parting from her yesterday was final.’

  “Desroches uttered a cry of rage and rushed at Wilhelm to disarm him; the struggle was a lengthy one; for the younger man answered Desroches’s shaking with a strength born of fury and desperation.

  “‘Give me that saber, you idiot! Give it to me!’ Desroches cried. ‘I refuse to be killed by a madman!’

  “‘Go ahead,’ Wilhelm retorted, choking with rage. ‘Kill the son in the same gallery. And the son’s a German too! A German!’

  “At that moment footsteps were heard and Desroches let go. Wilhelm was at the end of his strength.

  “Those footsteps were mine, gentlemen. Emilie had come to the presbytery and told me everything. The poor child wished to put herself under the protection of the Church. I kept back the words of pity that rose to my lips, and when she asked me whether she could continue to love her father’s murderer, I said nothing. She understood, shook my hand, and left in tears. I had a hunch, and followed her to the inn, where she was told that her brother and husband had gone together to the fortress, and, suspecting the awful truth, I arrived in time to prevent these two men, maddened by rage and grief, from enacting a further tragedy.

  “Although disarmed, Wilhelm refused to listen to Desroches’s pleading ; he was beaten, but his eyes still blazed with anger.

  “I reproached him for his obstinacy. ‘You alone,’ I said, ‘make the dead cry out for vengeance, and you alone would be the cause of this dreadful thing. Aren’t you a Christian? Do you want to trespass on God’s justice? Are you prepared to go through life with a murder on your hands? Atonement will be made, you may be sure of that, but it’s not for us to force it.’

  “Desroches shook my hand and said, ‘Emilie knows everything. I will never see her again. But I know what I must do to give her her freedom.”

  “‘What are you saying?’ I cried. ‘Do you mean suicide?’

  “At this word, Wilhelm got up and took Desroches’s hand.

  “‘No!’ he said, ‘I was wrong. I am the only offender. I should have borne my suffering in silence.’

  “I shan’t describe the agony we all went through on that fateful morning; I used every religious and philosophical argument I knew, but could find no way out of that cruel situation. A separation was inevitable, in any case, but what grounds for it could be stated in court? Not only would it be painful for all concerned, but there was a political danger in letting it be known.

  “I devoted myself to the task of defeating Desroches’s sinister intentions and creating in his mind a religious antipathy to the crime of suicide. As you know, the poor fellow had been schooled in eighteenth-century materialism. Since his wound, however, his ideas had changed considerably and he had become one of those half-skeptical Christians—we’ve seen so many—who have concluded a little religion can’t do any harm, and even consult a priest in case there may be a God! It was a vague belief like this that enabled him to listen to my comforting words.

  “A few days went by. Wilhelm and his sister had not left the inn, for Emilie’s health had not withstood the shock. Desroches stayed at the presbytery with me and spent his days reading the pious books I lent him. One day he went alone to the fort, and spent several hours there; on his return he showed me a sheet of paper with his name on it—his appointment as captain in a regiment that was about to rejoin the Partouneaux division.

  “In about a month’s time we received news of his strange and glorious death. Whatever may be said of the mad frenzy that drove him into battle, one felt sure that his bravery was a splendid example to the whole battalion, which had sustained heavy losses in the first charge.’

  When the story was over, the listeners remained silent, their minds absorbed by what they had heard of the life and death of this man. Then the priest rose from his seat and said, “If you have no objection to a change in the direction of our evening walk, gentlemen, we can follow this line of poplars glowing in the sunset, and I will take you to the Butte-aux-Lierres. From there we can see the cross of the convent where Madame Desroches withdrew.”

  Voltaire

  MICROMEGAS

  Micromégas

  Philosophical Story

  Chapter I

  JOURNEY OF AN INHABITANT OF THE WORLD OF THE STAR SIRIUS TO THE PLANET SATURN

  On one of those planets which revolve around the star named Sirius, there was a very witty young man whom I had the honor of knowing during the last journey he made to our little anthill. He was called Micromegas, a name which is most appropriate for all big men. He was eight leagues high. By eight leagues I mean twenty-four thousand geometrical paces of five feet each.

  Some mathematicians, men constantly useful to the public, will immediately take their pens and discover that, since Mr. Micromegas, an inhabitant of the land of Sirius, measures from head to foot twenty-four thousand royal feet, and since we citizens of earth barely measure five feet, and since our globe has nine thousand leagues in circumference, they will discover, I say, that the globe which produced him absolutely must have exactly twenty-one million six hundred thousand times more circumference than our small earth. Nothing is more simple and more commonplace in nature. The states of a few sovereigns in Germany or Italy, which can be crossed in half an hour, compared with the empires of Turkey, Muscovy or China,
are only a faint image of the prodigious differences which nature has created in all beings.

  His Excellency’s size being the height I said, all our sculptors and all our painters will easily agree that his waist measures fifty thousand royal feet around and this makes him very well proportioned.

  As for his mind, it is one of the most cultured we have. He knows many things. He has invented some. He was not yet two hundred and fifty years old, and was studying, according to custom, at the Jesuit college on his planet, when he solved, by the power of his brain, more than fifty theorems of Euclid. That is eighteen more than Blaise Pascal, who, after solving thirty-two with ease, according to his sister, then became a rather mediocre geometrician and a very bad metaphysician. At the end of childhood, when he was about four hundred and fifty years old, he dissected many of those small insects which do not have a hundred feet in diameter and which escape ordinary microscopes. He wrote a very unusual book about them which brought him trouble. The mufti of his country, a very ignorant hair-splitter, found in his book statements that were suspect, foul, rash, heretical, and smacking of heresy. He prosecuted him actively. The problem was whether the bodies of the fleas of Sirius were of the same substance as slugs. Micromegas defended himself wittily and won the women to his side. The lawsuit lasted two hundred and twenty years. At the end, the mufti had the book condemned by jurists who had not read it and the author was ordered not to appear at court for eight hundred years.

  He was only slightly upset at being banished from a court which was seething with vexations and pettinesses. He composed a very amusing song against the mufti who was unaffected by it. And he began to journey from planet to planet, in order to complete the development of “his mind and his heart,” as people say. Those who travel only in post-chaise or coach will doubtless be amazed at the conveyances in the planet above, for we, on our little mud pile, cannot imagine anything other than what we use. Our traveler knew remarkably well the laws of gravitation, and all the forces of attraction and repulsion. He used them so skillfully that, at times with the help of a sunbeam, and at other times with the help of a comet, he and those with him went from globe to globe, as a bird flits from branch to branch. He crossed the Milky Way in a very short time, and I am obliged to confess that he never saw, through the stars with which it is sown, that beautiful empyrean sky which the famous Reverend Derham boasts of having seen at the end of his spyglass. It’s not that I claim that Mr. Derham did not see properly. God forbid! But Micromegas was on the spot. After a long journey, Micromegas reached the globe of Saturn. Despite his being accustomed to seeing new things, he could not at first, on seeing the smallness of the globe and its inhabitants, keep from smiling in that superior fashion in which at times the wisest of men indulge. For Saturn, in a word, is scarcely nine hundred times larger than the earth, and the citizens of that land are dwarfs who are only a mere thousand fathoms tall. At first he and his friends laughed at them a bit, much as an Italian musician laughs at Lully’s music when he comes to France. But since the Sirian was intelligent, he quickly understood that a thinking being may very well not be ridiculous because he is only six thousand feet tall. After amazing them, he became acquainted with the Saturnians. He became an intimate friend of the secretary of the Academy of Saturn, a man of great wit who indeed had invented nothing, but who was well aware of the inventions of other men, and who produced quite good light verse and important computations. I shall relate here, for the benefit of the readers, an unusual conversation which Micromegas had one day with Mr. Secretary.

  Chapter II

  CONVERSATION OF THE INHABITANT OF SIRIUS WITH THE INHABITANT OF SATURN

  After his Excellency had gone to bed and the secretary had drawn near to his face, Micromegas said: “You must confess that there is much variety in nature.”

  “Yes,” said the Saturnian, “nature is like a flower bed in which the flowers . . .”

  “Oh!” said the other, “forget about your flower-bed.”

  The secretary continued, “It is like a gathering of blondes and brunettes whose dresses . . .”

  “What do I care about your brunettes?” said the other.

  “Then it is like a gallery of pictures whose features . . .”

  “But no,” said the traveler, “once more I tell you, nature is like nature. Why try to make comparisons?”

  “To please you,” answered the secretary.

  “I don’t want to be pleased,” answered the traveler, “I want to be taught. First begin by telling me how many senses the men in your world have.”

  “We have seventy-two,” said the academician, “and every day we complain of the small number. Our imagination surpasses our needs. We find that with our seventy-two senses, with our ring and our five moons, we are too limited. And despite all our curiosity and the fairly large number of passions which come from our seventy-two senses, we have all the time in the world to be bored.”

  “I believe you,” said Micromegas, “for in our world we have almost a thousand senses, and we still have strange vague desires, a strange restlessness which keeps warning us that we are of little consequence, and that there are beings much more perfect. I have traveled a little. I have seen mortals much below us. I have seen others far superior to us. But I have not seen any who have not more desires than real needs, and more needs than satisfaction. Perhaps one day I shall reach the country where nothing is lacking. But up until now no one has given me any real news of that country.”

  The Saturnian and the Sirian then wore themselves out with conjectures. But after many very ingenious and very insecure arguments, they had to come back to facts. “How long do you live?” asked the Sirian.

  “A very short time,” answered the small man from Saturn.

  “It is the same with us,” said the Sirian. “We are always complaining about the short time. It must be a universal law of nature.”

  “Alas!” said the Saturnian, “we live only five hundred complete revolutions of the sun. (That comes to fifteen thousand years, or approximately, in our way of counting.) You can see that means dying almost at the moment of birth. Our existence is a point, our duration an instant, our globe an atom. We have just begun to learn a few things when death comes before we have any experience. As for me, I don’t dare make any plans. I feel like a drop of water in a huge ocean. In front of you, especially, I am ashamed of the ridiculous figure I cut in this world.”

  Micromegas answered him, “If you were not a philosopher, I should fear to upset you by telling you that our life is seven hundred times longer than yours. But you know too well that when a man has to return his body to the elements, and to reanimate nature under another form—this is called dying—when that moment of metamorphosis has come, to have lived for an eternity or to have lived for a day, are precisely the same thing. I have been in countries where they live a thousand times longer than in my country, and there I discovered that people still complained. But everywhere there are intelligent people who know how to accept their fate and give thanks to the Creator. He spread over this universe abundant varieties with a kind of remarkable uniformity. For example, all thinking beings are different, and all fundamentally resemble one another in the gift of thought, and desires. Matter extends everywhere, but on each globe, it has different properties. How many of these various properties do you count in your matter?”

  “If,” said the Saturnian, “you are speaking of those properties without which we believe this globe could not exist as it is, we count three hundred, such as extension, impenetrability, mobility, gravitation, divisibility, and so on.”

  “It seems,” replied the traveler, “that this small number sufficed for the plans which the Creator had for your small dwelling. I admire His wisdom in everything. Everywhere I see differences, but also everywhere a sense of proportion. Your globe is small and so are your inhabitants. You have few sensations. Your matter has few properties. All that is the work of Providence. What color is your sun when you examine it closely?”
/>
  “A very yellowish white,” said the Saturnian. “And when we divide one of its rays, we find it contains seven colors.”

  “Our sun borders on red,” said the Sirian, “and we have thirty-nine primary colors. Among all those I have approached, there is not one sun which resembles another, as on your world there is no face which is not different from all others.”

  After several questions of this nature, he asked how many essentially different substances they counted on Saturn. He learned that they counted only about thirty, such as God, space, matter, beings which have extension and feeling, beings which have extension, feeling and thought, beings which have thought and no extension, beings which understand themselves and those which do not, and so forth. The Sirian, in whose world they counted three hundred, and who had discovered three thousand others in his travels, amazed to a prodigious degree the philosopher from Saturn. At last, after communicating to one another a bit of what they knew and a great deal of what they did not know, after arguing throughout a revolution of the sun, they decided to make a little philosophical journey together.

  Chapter III

  JOURNEY OF THE TWO INHABITANTS OF SIRIUS AND SATURN

  Our two philosophers were ready to embark upon the atmosphere of Saturn, with a fine supply of mathematical instruments, when the mistress of the Saturnian, who had heard of this, came in tears to protest. She was an attractive small brunette who was only six hundred and sixty fathoms tall, but who made up for the smallness of her stature by many charms. “Ah! cruel man,” she cried, “after resisting you for fifteen hundred years, when at last I was beginning to give in, you leave me to go on a journey with a giant from another world, when I had scarcely spent a hundred years in your arms. Off with you! Curiosity is your only passion; you have never been in love. If you were a real Saturnian, you would be faithful. Where are you trotting off to? What do you want? Our five moons are less mobile than you. Our ring is less variable. It is over now, I shall never love anyone else.” The philosopher kissed her, wept with her, despite his being a philosopher, and the lady, after fainting, went off to find consolation with one of the fops of the land.