His torment was horrible.
Suddenly, he threw himself furiously once again into the culpable dream to which he had immolated his duty, his conscience, his happiness, his entire existence. He clung to it; he wanted to sacrifice everything to it, to the last faculty of his life, the last thought of his soul. A moment later, he cursed his mad obsession, and, laughing bitterly, he repeated: “Insane! Insane!”
In that struggle, that doubt, that fever, he actually felt his mental strength weaken and his reason lose its lucidity. Inconsequential words escaped his lips involuntarily: truncated, aborted, incomplete, incoherent ideas were passing through his brain and filling it with tumult and disorder.
The peril was deadly and immense. If he did not put an end, by a prompt and energetic resolution, to that redoubtable crisis, his life and intelligence would succumb! Then, Monsieur, by a superhuman effort, Bertel desperately trampled his ideas of science and glory underfoot. He swore, by the salvation of his soul and on Ole’s corpse, to renounce them forever, to turn his head every time the demon evoked them before him! But those ideas, more obstinate than ever, pursued him, harassed him, surrounded him with an infernal circle, and whirled around him, repeating:
“The second sun! The second sun!”
In the hope of feeing himself from that torture, Bethel departed in all haste for Copenhagen. There, he knew, he would find a celestial creature, the one who had already protected him against remorse! He wanted to renounce his prideful errors at her feet, to ask for a forgiveness that he would obtain, and shelter from despair and madness beneath the wings of an angel…
Alas, Stierna was dead. She had died praying to God for Bertel.
Since then, Monsieur, many years have gone by without Bertel having found a moment of peace and rest. Hunted by a horde of invisible demons, he still marches on without stopping, like Ahasuerus. To his right and his left stand two equally fatal ideas: the memory of Stierna, full of remorse; and the crazy conviction that the creation of a second sun was a great, wise, sublime work! In vain, Monsieur, since the day when he renounced that ridiculous folly, has he refused to open a book of physics; in vain has he carefully avoided contact with the scientists he has met on his travels; everywhere a voice repeats to him:
You could have created a second sun!
And that voice is right, Monsieur—at least, I think so. Do we not live in a century in which physics is progressing with great strides and working miracles? Electricity and its study have opened up a new world. With the aid of electricity, Monsieur Becquerel,12 that illustrious scientist, has created veritable precious stones. I have seen little sapphires that have emerged from his laboratories; even for the most expert and experienced lapidary, they do not differ and any respect from the precious stones that nature produces. Monsieur Jacobi13 has made veritable statues by means of electricity, which bear the imprint of the most delicate work with a precision impossible for a skillful sculptor. Finally, Monsieur, Bertel’s sun itself, while the Danish professor rejected it as an absurd dream, was invented by Humphry Davy and perfected by Faraday. Those two celebrated physicists have used means very similar to Bertel’s methods, and arrived at the same results.
As for the copper balloon, it has been imagined and proven possible by one of the most skillful physicists of our time, Monsieur Prechtel,14 the director of the Polytechnic Institute of Vienna. That scientist has even drawn up plans for the balloon’s construction; in order to realize it, it would be necessary to expend the cost of a frigate.
If Stierna’s lover had not been discouraged, you see—if he had repelled his doubts, if he had not given in to fear, if he had had an unbreakable faith in himself, and if, finally, Ole’s madness had not disturbed him—given the time, the patience and the will, he would certainly have immortalized his name and created a second sun.
The stranger, who had let his head fall into his hands and was holding it hidden therein, finally raised it again, displaying features more deeply scored, more downcast and more livid than ever.
“Bertel, such as he is,” he said, in a sepulchral voice, “accepts his discomfiture with resignation, in expiation of his treason in regard to Stierna. If his sin was great, its punishment is terrible!”
As he finished these words, he got to his feet, turning away to hide the tears that were running from his lifeless eyes over his sunbronzed cheeks, and hurriedly walked away.
The French journalist searched for him in vain that evening during the 7 p.m. walk, at the ball, in the gaming halls, and the theater—in sum, everywhere. He did not find the unknown anywhere; no one could give him any information about him.
The next morning, it transpired that the old man had left the waters of Spa, not only without telling anyone, but also leaving all his luggage and a considerable sum of money behind in the room that he had occupied in the inn where he had been staying.
René de Pont-Jest: Mimer’s Head
(1863)
Every population has its mania, or rather its monomania; that is an incontestable psychological fact. Does the mental aberration in question originate from the climate, customs, language and environments in which it lives, or is it innate within instinct, as certain phrenologists, especially Gall, would like to suppose, in assigning a particular protuberance to every folly? Does it develop in accordance with natural law or by virtue of circumstances? We have no idea, and we are too respectful of our readers’ peace of mind to launch into the discussion into which that question might lead us. In our opinion, however, the internal word, the self, is always attached to the external world by threads that our incomplete perceptions truly do not permit us to grasp, and mental transformations inevitably have a material cause.
We shall therefore content ourselves with saying, along with many others, as many others will say after us, that every nation has its eccentricity. The English have the mania of spleen and voyages; the French that of loquacity and revolutions; the Spanish that of cigarettes and nobility; the Italians that of idleness and music; the Turks that of the harem and bestiality. The Russians like to pass everywhere for princes; the Chinese call us barbarians, taking their tea without sugar and crushing the feet of their women; The Indians want to be crushed under the wheels of the Juggernaut and drown themselves in the Ganges with the statue of Durga; the Madagascans generate little scars along the entire length of the facial angle; the members of Buddhist sects don’t eat meat; the New Caledonians eat their peers. We would never finish if we were prepared to believe travelers’ tales and wanted to continue in this vein, so let us get on to our story now.
One cold and foggy winter morning in 18**, Frankfurt-am-Main woke up ready to pay its tribute to the folly of the moment: bibliomania—an eccentricity of the collecting genre, certainly the strangest of monomanias, for what has not been collected since the day when humans first experienced that imperious need to possess, even what they could not enjoy? Some collect paintings when they no longer have any room in their galleries, others books—especially foreign books—but do not read the authors of their homeland. We know people who collect buttons, postage-stamps, theater posters, envelopes, pieces of rope with which people have hanged themselves and instruments of torture. One eccentric from Brussels, who died a short while ago, had a superb collection of crows’ eyes, which he showed off with pride. We do not know what use his heirs made of it.
In brief, on the aforementioned morning, Frankfurt, bibliomaniac and bibliophile—it is necessary not to confuse the two: a bibliomaniac is a worthy imitator of the Englishman who bought in London, in 1812, at the sale of the Duke of Roxburghe’s library,15 a 1471 edition of Boccaccio for 2260 pounds sterling; a bibliophile is a man who loves books for what they contain rather than their rarity—Frankfurt, bibliomaniac and bibliophile, as we were saying, headed for the old Jewish quarter. The sale was about to commence of the library of Octavius, a savant doctor who was reputed to possess the most curious books, but all of whose science had not outlived him for a second, because he had not writte
n it down on Earth or in Heaven.
Octavius’ house was the most original and most somber dwelling that one could wish to see; the house of a true scientist or sorcerer, and cold and damp as a tomb. It is necessary to go to Germany to find houses like that today. There were little low doors that opened on to long corridors, ill-lit at intervals by small windows trellised by spiders’ webs, then large rooms with low sculpted ceilings, which only received daylight via tiny lead-framed windows. Everywhere, in the largest room as well as the smallest coverts, there were books, instruments of physics and chemistry and manuscripts, all beneath a layer of dust, as if the wrath and ashes of Vesuvius had passed that way.
The crowd that precipitated itself into the house when the doors opened was the heteroclitic and heterogeneous mass that one encounters in all assemblies in which passion brings men together: bibliomaniacs, bibliophiles, bibliographers, bibliotaphs,16 lovers of good books, fine books, illustrated editions, fine bindings, fanatic collectors of rare books, cherished books, books annotated by famous men, bizarre books: in sum, idlers who were not buying anything and imbeciles who were buying everything.
What was being sold? We would need a whole volume just to provide a mere glimpse. After those works of general literature, philology, theology, jurisprudence, medicine, philosophy, pedagogy, science, geography, history and fine arts that everyone possesses or knows something about, came incunabula on which people swooped: xylographic impressions, among others Ars Moriendi sive de tentationibus morientium by Jean Sporer,17 map-painter, a majestic in-folio of very promising appearance; a Mainz Bible of 42 lines;18 a 1560 Catholicon; a 1517 Theuerdank; first editions of Jean Faust, or rather Jean Fust, and Peter Schoeffer; two copies of a Mainz Psalter; a Durandus Rationale in 60 leaves, with two initial letters printed in red and blue; a 1462 Bible in semi-Gothic characters; Cicero’s Offices by Fust alone, and the 1467; a Secunda secundae of St. Thomas, by Peter Schoeffer alone, in his turn. Then a thousand other typographic masterpieces by John Schoeffer, Peter’s son, Mentelin and Eggestein, and by those illustrious descendants of Gutenberg who emigrated to Italy following the troubles that overtook them in Mainz in 1462 and 1463; the Lactantius printed in 1465 at the convent of Subiaco, near Rome, by Conrad Sweynheim and Arnold Pannartz, who stayed in the monastery for some time before going to set up shop in the holy city; Pliny the Elder, Joannes de Spire, Venice 1460; Tacitus, Vendelin de Spire, Rome, circa 1468; Horace, Zarottus, Milan, circa 1470; Quintillian, Campani, also 1470, etc. etc. Then bindings by Derosne, Padeloup, Lervis, Roger Payne, old Dutch bindings in white vellum, others in morocco and Russian leather; and finally, manuscripts without end, in all languages and of all epochs: Egyptian manuscripts written on royal papyrus with inks of different colors and rolled up 3000 years before; Indian manuscripts from the library of some madrassah, a school on the banks of the Kaveri, on leaves of the talipot palm, cut into strips, on which the characters had been inscribed with a stiletto; Greek and Latin palimpsest manuscripts; red-tinted manuscripts written with gold and silver ink; Slavic manuscripts, Cyrillic and Hieronymian, libelli or wax tablets; manuscripts of the Carlovingian period, lavishly gilded in the Byzantine style; 10th century manuscripts, in which a Byzantine influence was revealed once again in the shiny backgrounds; eleventh-century manuscripts with browned gilding and graceful arabesques lightly traced with a graver; Persian manuscripts garnished with emeralds and pearls; in sum, richnesses of every sort, fought over by madmen and amateurs. Alongside all that rolled, twisted and grimaced flasks, alembics and crucibles still full of strange substances, the sight of which made one think of poisons, the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone.
A young man of about 25 was leaning on the sill of one of the windows in the large room where the sale of all these marvels was talking place, paying very little attention to what was going on around him. His large blue eyes, half-closed, were raised toward the ceiling; those who did not know him might have thought that he was following some dream of love in the empty space. He had long hair, neatly combed back. His entire person had a distinction and an extreme elegance; his feet were a trifle long and narrow, his hands pale and slender, his figure well-formed. His mouth, although perfectly-shaped, had something sad about the contraction of the lips. His physiognomy, in conclusion, expressed a mixture of youth, reflection, insouciance and melancholy.
Franz von Heberghem was not, however, one of the century’s unfortunates, as common parlance puts it. He had just come into possession of a considerable fortune, which his father had left him 15 years before; his comrades at the university liked him; his former teachers had the greatest regard for him; his mistress, if he had had one, would certainly not have been deceived very frequently; his tailor dressed him well; his friends did not borrow too much money from him. All these satisfactions, however, did not seem to make him happy; everywhere, in the public squares, taverns, theatres, fencing-schools—places where he was rarely seen—he was found dreaming, absorbed in thoughts that he did not communicate to anyone.
He was far from being in love; the beautiful Marguerite Heven, his cousin—who had blonde hair and blue eyes, like all Marguerites—darted her softest glances and most dazzling smiles at him in vain. He was not ambitious for honors and titles; at least, he had refused various positions from some prince of a country that has almost as many princes as subjects. His great misfortune was a strange indecision of the mind and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Nothing attracted or pleased him, if it was not science. His mother, while pregnant with him, must have been struck by the beauty of some Neapolitan youth lying in the sun; he was a veritable child of Campania.
To play a game, or to discuss anything but a philosophical issue, was beyond his strength. He spent the greater part of his day smoking, lying on one of the divans in his library, all of whose books he devoured but without any order, attaching himself to all theories, all sciences. He contrived to shift himself of his own accord, from time to time, for some good deed, but he had to be extracted from his home by force for any pleasurable pursuit.
“Oh my God,” he sometimes said, in a fit of misanthropy and idleness, “What wouldn’t I give to have a friend who would think for me! I’d no longer have to do anything but dream.”
One evening, when he had gone to visit one of his old university friends, who was a writer, he had found him in a moment of idleness and had said something that summed him up perfectly.
“There really are days when one is good for nothing, when one doubts everything,” his former fellow student said to him, rising from his armchair and taking his arm.
“Oh yes, there are years like that,” he replied, letting himself fall on a settee and closing his eyes in order to follow one of his aerial chimeras in a more tranquil manner.
Franz had, therefore, come to the Octavius sale without any purpose, without any desire to buy anything. The crowd had found him wandering along a street and had dragged him along without him having put up a struggle. It was simpler and less tiring for him to go where everyone else was going.
The vociferations of the hawkers, the arguments, and the bidders’ cries of joy and despair had not woken him up. He had watched, as indifferent as the destiny that was his god, the battle of two amateurs impassioned by a 1549 in-18 Greek New Testament printed by Robert Estienne, with two defects, and had, so to speak, fallen asleep standing up on the spot where the crowd had left him and we have introduced him to the reader.
Suddenly, he was wrenched out of his semi-slumber.
“This is yours, Monsieur le Baron,” said a short, thin and bony old man, presenting him with a small and venerable volume covered in dust, which seemed to be bound in parchment. “These people must know very little about it, or have very little money. Twenty florins for the Colloquia of Erasmus,19 printed by Simon de Collines, the husband of Henri Estienne’s widow! Twenty florins! Oh, if I were rich, you wouldn’t have got it at such a low price. Anyway, it’s yours.”
“Mine! Why?” Franz demanded, u
nderstanding nothing of what the bibliomaniac in rags was saying.
“Yours, of course—a windfall!” the old man replied, putting the book into his hand after having darted one last regretful glance at it. “Twenty florins! No one covered your bid; they saw that you were determined.”
“What bid? I haven’t opened my mouth.”
“Oh, Monsieur le Baron is joking. The bookseller Hartmann went as far as 12 florins, but you went to 20 in a single leap.”
“Me!”
“You!”
“Me!” Franz repeated, in a whisper, wondering whether he was the victim of a dream or a joke. He was certain that he had not pronounced a word for more than an hour.
“Ask these gentlemen,” the little old man went on, amazed by the young man’s hesitation. He took the crowd for his witness, extending his arm toward it.
The public was too intent on the continuing sale to take part in this singular argument, which had flared up a few paces away. Several spectators, however, turned round to affirm that they had not seen or heard anything. One always finds witnesses for any cause in crowds. If a wolf steals a lamb, there will be several people ready to affirm that it was the lamb that had attacked the wolf.
“Have I really bought a book?” Franz wondered, passing his hand over his forehead. “After all, it’s quite possible, although I strongly doubt it.”
His turn of mind, his love of the marvelous and his laziness ordered him to believe it immediately. To seek the truth in what had just happened would have been laborious.
The World Above The World Page 7
