by Voltaire
Astonished, Babouc gained admittance amongst the generals, and entered into their confidence. Finally one of them explained: ‘This war which has devastated Asia for twenty years was originally a quarrel between the eunuch of a wife of the great King of Persia and a clerk in an office of the great King of India. It was over a right worth the thirtieth part of a gold daric. The Indian prime minister and ours supported with dignity the rights of their masters. The quarrel became heated. Each side put a million soldiers into the field; and every year more than four hundred thousand men are needed as recruits. Murders, fires, ruins, devastation multiply apace; the whole world is suffering, and the fury continues. Our respective prime ministers keep protesting that they are only acting for the benefit of mankind; and with each protestation some town is razed and some provinces are ravaged.’
The next day, following a rumour that peace was about to be concluded, the Persian general and the Indian general rushed into battle; there was general carnage. Babouc witnessed all the misdeeds and abominations of war; he saw the machinations of the chief satraps who did what they could to have their own general defeated. He saw officers killed by their own troops; he saw soldiers who finished off their dying comrades in order to rob them of a few bloody, torn, mud-caked rags. He entered the hospitals where the wounded were taken, and where most of them died, owing to the inhuman negligence of the very people who were paid handsomely by the King of Persia to care for them. ‘Are these men’, cried Babouc, ‘or wild beasts? Ah! I can see that Persepolis will indeed be destroyed.’
Occupied with this thought he passed into the Indian camp: he was as well received here as by the Persians, as had been predicted; but he saw exactly the same excesses which had filled him with horror earlier. ‘Well!’ he said to himself, ‘if the angel Ithuriel wants to exterminate the Persians, the angel of India is going to have to destroy the Indians too.’ Discovering in more detail what had taken place in both armies, he learnt of acts of generosity, greatness of soul and humanity which astonished and delighted him. ‘Inexplicable race of man!’ he cried out; ‘How can you unite such baseness with such nobility, so many virtues with so many crimes?’
Meanwhile peace was declared. The commanders of the two armies, neither of whom had gained victory but had shed the blood of so many for self-interest, went off to request their reward at their respective courts. Peace was celebrated with public declarations announcing nothing less than the return of the Golden Age on earth. ‘The Lord be praised!’ said Babouc. ‘Persepolis will be the dwelling place of purified innocence; it will not be destroyed, as these wicked genies desired; let me hurry at once to this capital of Asia.’
CHAPTER II
He arrived in this immense city by the ancient entrance,1 whose vile rusticity was barbarous and offensive to the gaze. This part of the city bore marks everywhere of the age in which it was built: for despite men’s obstinacy in praising the ancient at the expense of the modern, it must be admitted that the first attempts in any field are always crude.
Babouc mingled with a crowd composed of the dirtiest and ugliest of either sex. This mob was pressing forward with a vacant air into a vast and gloomy enclosure. From the continuous murmuring and milling around which he observed, and the money which was changing hands for the right to sit down, he imagined he was in a market where rush-bottomed chairs were sold; but very soon, noticing that several women were kneeling and glancing sidelong at the men while pretending to be gazing fixedly ahead, he realized he was in a religious temple. Discordant voices, sharp, raucous and savage, made the vault echo with their obscure chantings,2 like the cries of asses on the plains of Poitou when they answer to the cowherd’s horn. Babouc stopped his ears; but he was tempted likewise to shut his eyes and hold his nose when he saw workmen entering the temple with picks and shovels. They raised a large stone and started digging, throwing up earth to right and left which gave off a foul smell; then they deposited a corpse in the opening and replaced the stone above it.3
‘What!’ exclaimed Babouc; ‘this people bury their dead in the very places where they worship the Godhead! Their temples are paved with cadavers! I am not surprised that Persepolis is constantly ravaged by pestilential illnesses. The stench of the dead, combined with that of so many of the living assembled and crowded into one place, is enough to poison the whole world. What a disgusting city! No doubt the angels want to destroy it so as to build a better one in its place, filled with less filthy inhabitants who can sing better. Providence must have its reasons; let us abide them.’
CHAPTER III
Meanwhile the sun was approaching its zenith. Babouc was engaged to dine on the other side of town with a lady to whom he had letters of introduction from her husband, an officer in the army. But first he took a few turns through Persepolis; he saw other temples, better built and ornamented, filled with a civilized congregation and echoing throughout with harmonious music; he noticed public fountains which, though poorly situated, were strikingly beautiful; squares where the greatest kings who had governed Persia seemed to breathe in bronze; other squares where he heard the people crying: ‘When shall we see among us the master whom we adore?’4 He admired the magnificent bridges thrown across the river, the superb and commodious quays, the palaces standing to left and right, and an immense edifice where thousands of old soldiers, wounded but triumphant, gave thanks every day to the god of armies.5 Finally he reached the lady’s house and found her awaiting his arrival, with a respectable company of dinner guests. The house was clean and elegant, the meal delicious, the lady young, beautiful, witty, engaging, and the company worthy of her. Babouc kept saying to himself: ‘The angel Ithuriel has some nerve to want to destroy so delightful a city.’
CHAPTER IV
He noticed, however, that the lady, who had begun by asking tenderly for news of her husband, was by the end of the meal conversing even more tenderly with a young mage.6 Then Babouc noticed a magistrate who despite the presence of his wife was warmly embracing a widow; the indulgent widow had one arm round the magistrate’s neck while extending the other to a very handsome and modest young citizen. The magistrate’s wife was the first to leave table, so as to converse in an adjoining room with her spiritual director, who had arrived late after being expected for dinner; this director, who was all eloquence, addressed her in this room with such vehemence and suavity that when the lady returned her eyes were swimming, her cheeks inflamed, her walk uncertain, and her speech tremulous.
Babouc began to fear then that Ithuriel might be right after all. His talent for inspiring trust placed him in the confidence of the hostess from that first evening; she confessed the attraction she felt towards the young priest, and assured Babouc that he would find the equivalent of what he had seen in her house in every establishment in Persepolis. Babouc concluded that such a society could not endure; that jealousy, discord and vengeance must devastate all these houses; that tears and bloodshed must flow daily; that husbands were either killing their wives’ lovers or being killed by them; and that, in short, Ithuriel was quite right to destroy at a stroke a city given over to constant calamity.
CHAPTER V
He was plunged in these baleful thoughts when there appeared at the door a grave personage in a black cloak, who humbly begged to speak with the young magistrate. Without rising, and without looking at him, the young man haughtily and carelessly handed him some papers and dismissed him. Babouc asked who the visitor was. The hostess whispered: ‘He is one of our finest lawyers; he has been studying the law for fifty years. The young gentleman, who is only twenty-five, and has been legal satrap for two days, has just ordered him to make an abstract of a case which he is to judge tomorrow and has not yet looked at.’ ‘The young scatterbrain acts wisely’, said Babouc, ‘to ask his elder’s advice; but why is the old man not the judge?’ ‘You jest,’ came the reply. ‘Those who grow old in laborious and menial posts never attain high office. This young man has an important post because his father is rich and because the right of dispen
sing justice is purchased here like a smallholding.’ ‘Oh immoral and unhappy city!’ cried Babouc. ‘This is the very depth of disorder; doubtless, those who have purchased in this way the right to judge will in turn sell their judgements: I see nothing here but an abyss of iniquity. ‘7
As he was thus giving vent to grief and astonishment, a young warrior who had returned that very day from the army said to him: ‘But why do you think legal positions should not be bought and sold? I myself bought the right to face death at the head of two thousand men whom I command; this year it has cost me forty thousand gold darics to sleep on the ground in a red tunic for thirty nights in a row, only to receive two smart arrow wounds which I still feel. If I ruin myself financially to serve the Persian Emperor whom I have never seen, then this legal satrap can surely pay for the pleasure of giving audience to litigants.’ Babouc in his indignation could not refrain from mentally condemning a country where the dignities of peace and war were put up for auction; he hastily concluded that the nature of both war and justice must be completely unknown there, and that, even if Ithuriel did not exterminate this nation, it would perish by its own detestable administration.
His poor opinion was confirmed by the arrival of a fat gentleman who, greeting the whole company with great familiarity, approached the young officer and said: ‘I can lend you only fifty thousand gold darics, because this year the Customs of the Empire have only brought me in three hundred thousand.’ Babouc enquired about this man who complained of earning so little; he learnt that in Persepolis there were forty plebeian magnates who had a lease on the Persian Empire, for which they paid the monarch a cut of their profits.8
CHAPTER VI
After dinner he visited one of the most superb temples in the city; he sat among a crowd of men and women who had come there to pass the time. A mage appeared in an elevated machine9 and spoke for a long time about vice and virtue. He divided into numerous categories what did not need any dividing; he offered methodical proofs of what was quite clear in the first place; he taught what everybody already knew. He worked himself into a passion, methodically, and departed sweating and out of breath. The whole assembly then awoke with the general impression of having received a lesson. Babouc said: ‘Now there is a man who has done his best to bore two or three hundred of his fellow-citizens; but his intentions were good; which is not sufficient grounds for destroying Persepolis.’
After leaving the assembly, he was taken to see a public festival which was held every day of the year; it took place in a sort of basilica, at one end of which a palace could be seen.10 The most beautiful women of Persepolis, and the most important satraps, all ranged in order, made a spectacle so fine that Babouc at first thought this was itself the festival. But two or three persons who seemed to be kings and queens soon appeared in the lobby of this palace; their speech was quite different from that of the people; it was measured, harmonious, sublime. Nobody slept; everyone listened in profound silence, interrupted only by expressions of sensibility and public admiration. The duty of kings, the love of virtue, the pitfalls of the passions, were delineated by strokes so vivid and affecting that Babouc was moved to tears. He had no doubt that these heroes and heroines, these kings and queens he had just heard, must be the appointed preachers of the Empire; he even thought of persuading Ithuriel to come and listen to them, convinced that such a spectacle would forever reconcile him with this city.
As soon as the festival was over, he desired to see the principal queen who had expressed so noble and so chaste a morality in this beautiful palace. He was led to her Majesty, up a small staircase to a poorly furnished apartment on the second floor, where he found an ill-dressed woman, who said to him with a noble and pathetic air: ‘This profession does not bring me enough to live on; one of the princes you saw has given me a child; I am expecting the baby soon; I have no money and without money one cannot give birth.’ Babouc gave her a hundred pieces of gold, saying: ‘Were this the only thing wrong with Persepolis, Ithuriel would be wrong to get angry.’
From there he went and passed the evening with some merchants who traded in useless luxuries. He was taken there by an intelligent man with whom he had become acquainted; he bought what pleased him, and it was politely sold to him for a lot more than its worth. Returning home, his friend pointed out how much he had been swindled. Babouc made a note of the merchant’s name in his tablets, so that Ithuriel could single him out on the day the city was punished. While he was writing there was a knock at the door. It was the merchant himself, who had come to return the purse which Babouc had accidentally left behind on his counter. ‘How can it be’, exclaimed Babouc, ‘that you are so honourable and generous, yet you were not ashamed to sell me your trinkets at four times their value?’
‘Any merchant of repute in this town’, replied the latter, ‘would have returned your purse; but you were deceived when you were told that I overcharged you four times for what you bought in my shop: I overcharged you ten times, so much so that if you try to sell these things in a month’s time you will not even obtain the tenth of what you paid. But nothing could be fairer: it is men’s fantasy which sets the price upon these frivolities; their fantasy in turn provides a living for the hundred workmen I employ; it gives me a beautiful house, a comfortable carriage, horses; it promotes industry, and keeps up taste, the circulation of wealth and affluence. I sell the same baubles to the neighbouring nations more expensively than to you, and in this way I am useful to the Empire.’11
Babouc, after reflecting for a moment, struck the merchant’s name off his tablets.
CHAPTER VII
Deeply confused as to what he should think of Persepolis, Babouc next resolved to consult the mages and the scholars: for the latter study wisdom and the former study religion; and he flattered himself that they could obtain clemency for the rest of the population. The next morning he repaired to a college of mages. The archimandrite12 admitted that he had an income of one hundred thousand crowns in return for taking a vow of poverty, and that he enjoyed considerable authority by virtue of his vow of humility; after which he left Babouc in the care of a small friar who did the honours of the place.
While this friar was showing him the splendours of this house of penitence, a rumour spread that Babouc had come on a mission to reform all the religious houses. Immediately he received memoranda from each and every house; the gist of all these reports was: ‘Preserve us and destroy all the others.’ To listen to their justifications, these institutions were all essential; to listen to their mutual accusations they all deserved to be abolished. He marvelled that none of them wished to edify the universe without ruling it in the process.
There then appeared a little man who was a demi-mage, and who said to Babouc: ‘I see that our work is about to be fulfilled, for Zoroaster has returned to the earth, and little girls are prophesying by having themselves pinched and whipped front and rear. We therefore ask your protection against the Great Lama.’13 ‘What!’ said Babouc, ‘against the Pontiff-King who lives in Tibet?’ ‘The very same.’ ‘Are you at war, and raising armies against him?’ ‘No, but he says that man is free and we believe no such thing; we denounce him in pamphlets which he does not read; he has scarcely even heard of us; he has simply condemned us, as a master orders the destruction of the caterpillars on the trees in his garden.’ Babouc shuddered at the madness of these men who made a profession of wisdom, at the intrigues of those who had renounced the world, at the ambition and overweening covetousness of those who preached humility and disinterestedness; he concluded that Ithuriel had good reason to destroy the entire crew.
CHAPTER VIII
Returning home, he sent for some new books to allay his despondency, and invited some men of letters to dinner to restore his spirits. Twice as many came as were invited, like wasps attracted by honey. These parasites were avid for food and talk; they praised two kinds of person, the dead and themselves, but never their contemporaries, with the exception of their host. If one of their number made a witty
remark the others lowered their eyes and bit their lips in chagrin for not having thought of it themselves. They dissimulated less than the mages, because the objects of their ambition were so much smaller. Each of them coveted the post of secretary in a great house and the reputation of being a great man; they traded insults openly, which they believed to be shafts of wit. They had heard something of Babouc’s mission. One of them privately begged him to exterminate a rival who had not sufficiently praised him five years earlier; another asked him to get rid of a citizen who had never laughed at his comedies; a third asked for the abolition of the Academy because he had never been able to get himself elected to it. When the meal was over each of them left separately, because in the entire tribe there were not two men who could endure or even speak to each other except at the tables of the rich. Babouc concluded that there would be no great harm if all this vermin perished in the general conflagration.
CHAPTER IX
As soon as he had got rid of these men of letters, he began to read some new books. He immediately recognized in them the humour of his departed guests. With indignation he sampled their malicious periodicals, their archives of bad taste dictated by envy, baseness and hunger; their craven satires where the vulture is spared and the dove torn to pieces; their novels devoid of imagination, where one reads so many portraits of women the author has not known.
