Micromegas and Other Short Fictions (Penguin ed.)

by Voltaire

  CHAPTER X

  Monsieur Husson spoke to me yesterday about his travels: having spent several years in the Ports of the Levant, he visited Persia, stayed for a long period in India, and saw the whole of Europe. ‘I noticed’, he said, ‘that a prodigious number of Jews are waiting for the Messiah, who would let themselves be impaled sooner than admit that he has already come. I have met a thousand Turks who are convinced that Mohammed had hidden the other half of the moon up his sleeve. Ordinary people, the world over, believe the most extraordinary things. However, were a philosopher to divide an écu with the most imbecilic of these unfortunates, in whom the light of human reason is so dreadfully dimmed, it follows that if there is a sou to be won then the imbecile will get the upper hand of the philosopher. How comes it that moles, so blind to the larger interests, are so lynx-eyed about the smaller? Why is the same Jew who cuts your throat on Friday so loath to steal a farthing from you on the Sabbath? This contrariness of our species merits examination.’

  ‘Is it not simply the case’, I replied, ‘that men are superstitious by custom, but wicked by instinct?’

  ‘I shall think about that,’ said Monsieur Husson; ‘but it seems a reasonable explanation.’

  CHAPTER XI

  After the episode of the theatre-box usher, Punchinello suffered many disgraces. The English, who are disputatious and gloomy, have persisted in preferring their Shakespeare over him;48 but elsewhere his farces have been very fashionable, and, aside from the Opéra-Comique, his was the leading theatre. He had great quarrels with Scaramouche and Harlequin, and the outcome has still to be decided. However…

  CHAPTER XII

  ‘In which case, Monsieur,’ I went on, ‘how is it possible to be at the same time so barbarous and so entertaining? Why, in the history of a people, does one find on the one hand the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and on the other the tales of La Fontaine, etc.? Is it the effect of climate? Or of the laws?’

  ‘The human species’, replied Monsieur Husson, ‘is capable of anything. Nero wept when he had to sign the death warrant of a common criminal, he acted in farces, and he assassinated his mother. Monkeys perform extremely funny capers, but they also smother their little ones. Nothing is more gentle, more timid than a greyhound bitch; but she will tear to pieces a hare, and steep her long muzzle in its blood.’

  ‘You should write a fine book for us’, I said to him, ‘which would develop all these contradictions.’

  ‘That book exists already: you have only to observe a weathervane; it turns sometimes to the gentle breath of Zephyrus, sometimes to the violent North wind: such is man.’

  CHAPTER XIII

  Often nothing is more convenient than to fall in love with one’s cousin. Or one’s niece; but it costs eighteen thousand livres, payable to Rome, to marry a cousin, and eighty thousand livres to sleep with a niece in the legitimacy of the marriage bed.

  I calculate that forty nieces per year marry their uncles, and two hundred cousins are joined together in wedlock, which makes six million eight hundred thousand livres lost to the realm annually in marriage ceremonies. Add to this approximately six hundred thousand livres for what are termed the papal revenues on French lands, which the French King accords his subjects in the form of benefices; add minor expenses on top, and this makes about eight million four hundred thousand livres which we pay without demur to the Holy Father every year. Perhaps I exaggerate a little; but it will be agreed that if there is a glut of pretty cousins and nieces, and if the mortality rate affects the beneficiaries, then the figure could double. The burden would be heavy, given that we also have ships to build and armies and investors to pay.

  It astonishes me that, among the enormous quantity of books by authors who have governed this state for the past twenty years, none has thought to reform these abuses. I asked a friend of mine who is a Doctor of the Sorbonne to show me the place in the Scriptures which says that France must pay Rome the aforesaid sums: he could not find it. I spoke of the matter to a Jesuit; he replied that this tax was imposed on the Gauls by St Peter, from the first year he came to Rome. As I doubted that St Peter had ever made that journey, he convinced me by telling me that the keys to Paradise which Peter always carried around on his belt are still to be seen in Rome. ‘It is true’, added this Jesuit, ‘that no canonical author speaks of the journey of this Simon Bar-jona;49 but we have a fine letter of St Peter, dated from Babylon. Now assuredly Babylon means Rome, and therefore you Frenchmen owe the Pope money whenever you marry your cousins.’ I admit that I was struck by the force of this argument.

  CHAPTER XIV

  I have an aged relative who served the King for fifty-two years. He retired to the Haute-Alsace, where he has a small estate which he cultivates, in the diocese of Porentru.50 One day he wanted to have his fields given their final ploughing – the season was advanced and time was short. His farmhands refused, on the grounds that it was the Feast of St Barbara, the most celebrated saint in Porentru. ‘Well! my friends,’ said this relative, ‘you have already been to mass in honour of Barbara, and have rendered to Barbara what is Barbara’s; now render to me what is mine: go and till my field instead of taking off to the tavern. Does St Barbara order you to get drunk in her honour, while I remain without wheat this year?’ The head farmhand replied: ‘Monsieur, you can see that I should be damned in hell if I worked on such a holy day. St Barbara is the highest saint in Heaven; she once traced the sign of the cross on a marble column with the tip of her finger; and with the same finger, and the same sign, she made all the teeth fall out of a dog that had bitten her on the buttocks. I’ll not work on St Barbara’s Day, and that’s that.’

  My relative sent off for some Lutheran farmhands, and his field was tilled. The Bishop of Porentru excommunicated him. My relative appealed against this as excessive; the case has yet to be tried. Nobody believes more firmly than my relative that we must honour the saints, but he also claims that we must till the soil.

  I estimate that there are approximately five million workers in France, whether labourers or artisans, who earn on average twenty sous per day, and who are piously constrained to earn nothing on thirty days of the year, not including Sundays: which makes a hundred and fifty million less in money circulation, and a hundred and fifty million less in manpower. What a prodigious advantage our neighbouring countries must have over us, who have neither a St Barbara nor a Bishop of Porentru! The reply to these objections was that the taverns, open on feast days, contribute a great deal to the state coffers. My relative agreed; but he maintained that this was a minor compensation; and that besides, if one can go to work after mass one can go to the tavern after work. He maintains that it is all a civic matter, and nothing to do with the episcopate; moreover, that it is better to work in the fields than it is to get drunk. I greatly fear that he will lose his lawsuit.

  CHAPTER XV

  A few years ago, travelling through Burgundy with Monsieur Evrard, who is known to you all, we saw a vast palace under construction. I enquired as to which prince owned it. A mason replied that it was Monsignor the Abbot of Cîteaux; that the deal had been struck at seventeen hundred thousand livres, but that it would probably cost a lot more than that yet.

  I thanked God for placing his faithful servant in a position to raise such a handsome edifice, and lavish so much money upon the region. ‘You jest, surely?’ said Monsieur Evrard. ‘Is it not rather an abomination that idleness should be rewarded by an income of two hundred and fifty thousand livres, when the vigilance of a poor country priest is punished by a "due portion", amounting to a hundred écus? Is this inequality not the most unjust and odious thing in the world? Of what benefit is it to the state that a monk is lodged in a palace worth two million? Twenty families of impoverished officers, if they shared this two million, would each have an honest fortune, and would produce more officers for the king. Petty monks, who are today the useless subjects of one elected from their own number, would become members of the state instead of being merely a canker wh
ich gnaws away at it.’

  I replied to Monsieur Evrard: ‘There you go too far, and too fast; what you suggest will certainly come to pass in two or three hundred years; have patience.’ ‘But it is precisely because it will come to pass only in the course of two or three centuries that I lose all patience,’ he replied; ‘I am tired of all the abuses I see: it seems to me that I am walking in the Libyan desert, and our blood is being sucked by insects when we are not being devoured by lions.’

  ‘I had a sister,’ he continued, ‘sufficiently imbecilic as to be a Jansenist in good faith rather than out of political faction. The noble episode concerning the bills of confession51 caused her to die of despair. My brother had a lawsuit in which he had won the first round; his fortune depended on it. For some reason I do not understand the judges stopped dispensing justice, and my brother was ruined. I have an old uncle riddled with wounds who was having his furniture and plate transported from one province to the next; some nimble clerks seized everything on the pretext of a minor infringement; my uncle was unable to pay the fine, and died in prison.’

  Monsieur Evrard told me stories of this nature for two whole hours. I said to him: ‘My dear sir, I have endured even more than you; mankind is the same the world over: we imagine that abuses reign only in our own countries; you and I are both like La Fontaine’s Astolphe and Joconde, who started by thinking that only their wives were unfaithful; but everywhere on their travels they found men belonging to the same brotherhood.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Monsieur Evrard, ‘but they had the pleasure everywhere they went of giving back what had been so obligingly lent to them at home.’

  ‘Just try for three years being director of this, that or the other,’ I suggested, ‘and you will avenge yourself with interest.’

  Monsieur Evrard took me at my word: in the whole of France today he is the man who robs both king, state and his fellow-men in the most nobly disinterested fashion; he enjoys the best fare, and nobody appreciates a new play with greater zest.

  An Indian Incident

  Translated by an Ignoramus

  As everyone knows, Pythagoras,1 during his sojourn in India, learnt from Gymnosophists the languages of animals and plants. Strolling one day in a meadow quite close to the seashore, he heard these words: ‘How miserable I am to have been born grass! Hardly have I grown two inches high than a ravaging monster appears, a hideous creature who tramples me under his huge feet, whose jaws are armed with a row of scythes with which to cut me down, tear me to pieces and swallow me. And men call these monsters sheep. I do not believe there is in this world a more abominable animal.’

  Pythagoras advanced a few steps further; he found an oyster lying half-open on a little rock; Pythagoras had not as yet embraced that admirable law according to which it is forbidden to eat our fellow-creatures. He was about to swallow the oyster when it spoke these touching words: ‘O Nature! How happy to be grass, which like me is one of your works; when it is cut down it is reborn, for it is immortal; but in vain are we poor oysters protected by our double armour; blackguards eat us by the dozen for dinner, and that is the end of us for ever. What a dreadful fate to be an oyster, and what a barbarian is man!’

  Pythagoras shuddered; he felt the enormity of the crime that he was about to commit: he begged forgiveness of the oyster with tears in his eyes, and placed it carefully back on its rock.

  Pondering this incident deeply on his way back to town, he saw spiders eating flies, swallows eating spiders, and sparrow-hawks eating swallows. ‘None of this lot’, he said to himself, ‘is a philosopher.’

  Entering the city, Pythagoras was jostled, crushed and knocked down by a crowd of ruffians and their womenfolk, who ran along shouting: ‘Well done, well done, they had it coming to them!’ ‘Who? What?’ said Pythagoras, getting to his feet; but they continued running past and shouting: ‘What a pleasure it will be to watch them cook!’

  Pythagoras thought they must be talking about lentils or some other vegetables. Not at all; they were discussing two poor Indians. ‘Ah,’ said Pythagoras, ‘doubtless these are two great philosophers who are tired of life; they are looking forward to being reborn in another form; it is pleasant to change house, even though one is always poorly housed; there is no disputing about tastes.’

  He advanced with the crowd to the public square, where he saw a great pyre burning, and facing it a bench named a tribunal, and on this bench a row of judges, each of whom was holding a cow’s tail in his hand, and on his head a bonnet exactly like the ears of the animal which carried Silenus in former times, when he came to this country with Bacchus, having crossed the Red Sea without getting his feet wet, and after stopping in their tracks the sun and the moon, as is faithfully recorded in the Orphic Poems.

  Among the judges was an honest man well known to Pythagoras. This Indian sage explained to the sage from Samos the meaning of the festival about to be performed for the populace.

  ‘These two Indians’, he said, ‘have no desire whatever to be burned alive. My solemn colleagues have condemned them to this torture; the first for saying that the substance of Xaca is not the same substance as that of Brahma; and the other, for offering the view that one can please the Supreme Being through being virtuous, without needing to hold a cow by the tail when at the point of death, since, he claimed, one can be virtuous at all times, but one cannot always get hold of a cow at the right moment. The good women of the city have been so shocked by these two heretical propositions that they have given the judges no respite until they ordered the execution of these two unfortunates.’

  Pythagoras concluded that, from the blade of grass to man himself, there is no lack of distressing subjects. Nonetheless he managed to make the judges, and even the believers, hear reason – though it is the only recorded occasion on which this has ever happened.

  He then went to Croton and preached tolerance, where a fanatic set fire to his house and he who had saved two Indians from the flames was himself burned to death. Sauve qui peut!

  Lord Chesterfield’s Ears

  and Parson Goodman

  CHAPTER I

  Ah! Fate governs irremissibly everything in this world. I judge, as is natural, from my own experience.

  Lord Chesterfield, who was very fond of me, had promised to be of assistance. A good ‘preferment’ in his nomination fell vacant. I hurried up to London from the depths of the country; I presented myself before his Lordship; I reminded him of his promises; he shook me warmly by the hand and said that indeed I did look ill. I replied that my greatest ill was poverty. He answered that he wished to cure me and gave me a letter on the spot for Mr Sidrac, near the Guildhall.

  I had no doubt that Mr Sidrac was the man to expedite my nomination to a living. I rushed to his house. Mr Sidrac, who was his Lordship’s surgeon, began to examine me forthwith, and assured me that if I had the stone he would happily open me up.

  You must understand that his Lordship had heard I was suffering great pain in the bladder, and with his usual generosity intended I should be operated upon at his expense. He had gone deaf, just like his brother, and I had not been informed of it.

  While I was wasting time defending my bladder against Mr Sidrac, who wanted to examine me at all costs, one of the fifty-two competitors who were after the same living arrived at his Lordship’s, asked for my living, and obtained it.

  I was in love with Miss Fidler, whom I was to marry as soon as I became a vicar; my rival took my place and my mistress.

  His Lordship, learning of my disaster and his error, promised to set everything right; but he died two days afterwards.

  Mr Sidrac made me see, as clear as daylight, that my good patron could not have lived a minute longer, owing to the state of his internal organs, and proved to me that his deafness came only from the extreme dryness of the tympanic cord and drum of his ear. He even offered to harden up my two ears with spirits of wine, such as to make me deafer than any peer of the realm.

  I realized that Mr Sidrac was a very le
arned man. He inspired me with a taste for the science of nature. Moreover, I saw that he was a charitable man, who would operate upon me for nothing if necessary, and would aid me in whatever accident might arise in the neck of my bladder.

  So I began to study nature under his direction, to console myself for the loss of my vicarage and my mistress.

  CHAPTER II

  After much observation of nature through my five senses plus telescopes and microscopes, I said to Mr Sidrac one day: ‘We are dupes. There is no such thing as nature; everything is art. It is by the most admirable art that all the planets dance regularly around the sun, while the sun turns round upon himself. Evidently someone as learned as the members of the Royal Society of London must have arranged things in such a way that the square of the revolutions of each planet is always proportionate to the cube root of their distance from their centre; and a man must be a sorcerer to guess it.

  ‘The ebb and flow of our Thames seem to me the constant result of an art no less profound and not any the less difficult to understand.

  ‘Animals, vegetables, minerals, all seem to me arranged with weight, measure, number and movement. Everything that exists is a spring, a lever, a pulley, a hydraulic machine, a chemical laboratory – from the blade of grass to the oak-tree, from the flea to the man, from a grain of sand to our clouds.

  ‘Surely there is nothing but art, and nature is but a delusion.’

  ‘You are right,’ said Mr Sidrac, ‘but you are not the first in the field; this has already been stated by a dreamy fellow on the other side of the English Channel,1 though nobody has paid any attention to him.’