Zanoni

“How long is it since you have taken food?”

“Food! only this broth. There is the basin, all I have taken these six hours. I had scarce drunk it ere these pains began.”

The stranger looked at the basin; some portion of the contents was yet left there.

“Who administered this to you?”

“Who? Jean! Who else should? I have no servant,—none! I am poor, very poor, sir. But no! you physicians do not care for the poor. I AM RICH! can you cure me?”

“Yes, if Heaven permit. Wait but a few moments.”

The old man was fast sinking under the rapid effects of poison. The stranger repaired to his own apartments, and returned in a few moments with some preparation that had the instant result of an antidote. The pain ceased, the blue and livid colour receded from the lips; the old man fell into a profound sleep. The stranger drew the curtains round the bed, took up the light, and inspected the apartment. The walls of both rooms were hung with drawings of masterly excellence. A portfolio was filled with sketches of equal skill,—but these last were mostly subjects that appalled the eye and revolted the taste: they displayed the human figure in every variety of suffering,—the rack, the wheel, the gibbet; all that cruelty has invented to sharpen the pangs of death seemed yet more dreadful from the passionate gusto and earnest force of the designer. And some of the countenances of those thus delineated were sufficiently removed from the ideal to show that they were portraits; in a large, bold, irregular hand was written beneath these drawings, “The Future of the Aristocrats.” In a corner of the room, and close by an old bureau, was a small bundle, over which, as if to hide it, a cloak was thrown carelessly. Several shelves were filled with books; these were almost entirely the works of the philosophers of the time,—the philosophers of the material school, especially the Encyclopedistes, whom Robespierre afterwards so singularly attacked when the coward deemed it unsafe to leave his reign without a God.

(“Cette secte (les Encyclopedistes) propagea avec beaucoup de zele l’opinion du materialisme, qui prevalut parmi les grands et parmi les beaux esprits; on lui doit en partie cette espece de philosophie pratique qui, reduisant l’Egoisme en systeme regarde la societe humaine comme une guerre de ruse, le succes comme la regle du juste et de l’injuste, la probite comme une affaire de gout, ou de bienseance, le monde comme le patrimoine des fripons adroits.”—“Discours de Robespierre,” Mai 7, 1794. (This sect (the Encyclopaedists) propagate with much zeal the doctrine of materialism, which prevails among the great and the wits; we owe to it partly that kind of practical philosophy which, reducing Egotism to a system, looks upon society as a war of cunning; success the rule of right and wrong, honesty as an affair of taste or decency: and the world as the patrimony of clever scoundrels.))

A volume lay on a table,—it was one of Voltaire, and the page was opened at his argumentative assertion of the existence of the Supreme Being. (“Histoire de Jenni.”) The margin was covered with pencilled notes, in the stiff but tremulous hand of old age; all in attempt to refute or to ridicule the logic of the sage of Ferney: Voltaire did not go far enough for the annotator! The clock struck two, when the sound of steps was heard without. The stranger silently seated himself on the farther side of the bed, and its drapery screened him, as he sat, from the eyes of a man who now entered on tiptoe; it was the same person who had passed him on the stairs. The new-comer took up the candle and approached the bed. The old man’s face was turned to the pillow; but he lay so still, and his breathing was so inaudible, that his sleep might well, by that hasty, shrinking, guilty glance, be mistaken for the repose of death. The new-comer drew back, and a grim smile passed over his face: he replaced the candle on the table, opened the bureau with a key which he took from his pocket, and loaded himself with several rouleaus of gold that he found in the drawers. At this time the old man began to wake. He stirred, he looked up; he turned his eyes towards the light now waning in its socket; he saw the robber at his work; he sat erect for an instant, as if transfixed, more even by astonishment than terror. At last he sprang from his bed.

“Just Heaven! do I dream! Thou—thou—thou, for whom I toiled and starved!—THOU!”

The robber started; the gold fell from his hand, and rolled on the floor.

“What!” he said, “art thou not dead yet? Has the poison failed?”

“Poison, boy! Ah!” shrieked the old man, and covered his face with his hands; then, with sudden energy, he exclaimed, “Jean! Jean! recall that word. Rob, plunder me if thou wilt, but do not say thou couldst murder one who only lived for thee! There, there, take the gold; I hoarded it but for thee. Go! go!” and the old man, who in his passion had quitted his bed, fell at the feet of the foiled assassin, and writhed on the ground,—the mental agony more intolerable than that of the body, which he had so lately undergone. The robber looked at him with a hard disdain. “What have I ever done to thee, wretch?” cried the old man,—“what but loved and cherished thee? Thou wert an orphan,—an outcast. I nurtured, nursed, adopted thee as my son. If men call me a miser, it was but that none might despise thee, my heir, because Nature has stunted and deformed thee, when I was no more. Thou wouldst have had all when I was dead. Couldst thou not spare me a few months or days,—nothing to thy youth, all that is left to my age? What have I done to thee?”

“Thou hast continued to live, and thou wouldst make no will.”

“Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!”

“TON DIEU! Thy God! Fool! Hast thou not told me, from my childhood, that there is NO God? Hast thou not fed me on philosophy? Hast thou not said, ‘Be virtuous, be good, be just, for the sake of mankind: but there is no life after this life’? Mankind! why should I love mankind? Hideous and misshapen, mankind jeer at me as I pass the streets. What hast thou done to me? Thou hast taken away from me, who am the scoff of this world, the hopes of another! Is there no other life? Well, then, I want thy gold, that at least I may hasten to make the best of this!”

“Monster! Curses light on thy ingratitude, thy—”

“And who hears thy curses? Thou knowest there is no God! Mark me; I have prepared all to fly. See,—I have my passport; my horses wait without; relays are ordered. I have thy gold.” (And the wretch, as he spoke, continued coldly to load his person with the rouleaus). “And now, if I spare thy life, how shall I be sure that thou wilt not inform against mine?” He advanced with a gloomy scowl and a menacing gesture as he spoke.

The old man’s anger changed to fear. He cowered before the savage. “Let me live! let me live!—that—that—”

“That—what?”

“I may pardon thee! Yes, thou hast nothing to fear from me. I swear it!”

“Swear! But by whom and what, old man? I cannot believe thee, if thou believest not in any God! Ha, ha! behold the result of thy lessons.”

Another moment and those murderous fingers would have strangled their prey. But between the assassin and his victim rose a form that seemed almost to both a visitor from the world that both denied,—stately with majestic strength, glorious with awful beauty.

The ruffian recoiled, looked, trembled, and then turned and fled from the chamber. The old man fell again to the ground insensible.

CHAPTER 1.VIII

To know how a bad man will act when in power, reverse all the doctrines he preaches when obscure.—S. Montague.

Antipathies also form a part of magic (falsely) so-called.  Man naturally has the same instinct as the animals, which warns them involuntarily against the creatures that are hostile or fatal to their existence.  But HE so often neglects it, that it becomes dormant.  Not so the true cultivator of the Great Science, etc.

–Trismegistus the Fourth (a Rosicrucian).

When he again saw the old man the next day, the stranger found him calm, and surprisingly recovered from the scene and sufferings of the night. He expressed his gratitude to his preserver with tearful fervour, and stated that he had already sent for a relation who would make arrangements for his future safety and mode of life. “For I have money yet left,” said the old man; “and henceforth have no motive to be a miser.” He proceeded then briefly to relate the origin and circumstances of his connection with his intended murderer.

It seems that in earlier life he had quarrelled with his relations,—from a difference in opinions of belief. Rejecting all religion as a fable, he yet cultivated feelings that inclined him—for though his intellect was weak, his dispositions were good—to that false and exaggerated sensibility which its dupes so often mistake for benevolence. He had no children; he resolved to adopt an enfant du peuple. He resolved to educate this boy according to “reason.” He selected an orphan of the lowest extraction, whose defects of person and constitution only yet the more moved his pity, and finally engrossed his affection. In this outcast he not only loved a son, he loved a theory! He brought him up most philosophically. Helvetius had proved to him that education can do all; and before he was eight years old, the little Jean’s favourite expressions were, “La lumiere et la vertu.” (Light and virtue.) The boy showed talents, especially in art.

The protector sought for a master who was as free from “superstition” as himself, and selected the painter David. That person, as hideous as his pupil, and whose dispositions were as vicious as his professional abilities were undeniable, was certainly as free from “superstition” as the protector could desire. It was reserved for Robespierre hereafter to make the sanguinary painter believe in the Etre Supreme. The boy was early sensible of his ugliness, which was almost preternatural. His benefactor found it in vain to reconcile him to the malice of Nature by his philosophical aphorisms; but when he pointed out to him that in this world money, like charity, covers a multitude of defects, the boy listened eagerly and was consoled. To save money for his protege,—for the only thing in the world he loved,—this became the patron’s passion. Verily, he had met with his reward.

“But I am thankful he has escaped,” said the old man, wiping his eyes. “Had he left me a beggar, I could never have accused him.”

“No, for you are the author of his crimes.”

“How! I, who never ceased to inculcate the beauty of virtue? Explain yourself.”

“Alas! if thy pupil did not make this clear to thee last night from his own lips, an angel might come from heaven to preach to thee in vain.”

The old man moved uneasily, and was about to reply, when the relative he had sent for—and who, a native of Nancy, happened to be at Paris at the time—entered the room. He was a man somewhat past thirty, and of a dry, saturnine, meagre countenance, restless eyes, and compressed lips. He listened, with many ejaculations of horror, to his relation’s recital, and sought earnestly, but in vain, to induce him to give information against his protege.

“Tush, tush, Rene Dumas!” said the old man, “you are a lawyer. You are bred to regard human life with contempt. Let any man break a law, and you shout, ‘Execute him!’”

“I!” cried Dumas, lifting up his hands and eyes: “venerable sage, how you misjudge me! I lament more than any one the severity of our code. I think the state never should take away life,—no, not even the life of a murderer. I agree with that young statesman,—Maximilien Robespierre,—that the executioner is the invention of the tyrant. My very attachment to our advancing revolution is, that it must sweep away this legal butchery.”

The lawyer paused, out of breath. The stranger regarded him fixedly and turned pale.

“You change countenance, sir,” said Dumas; “you do not agree with me.”

“Pardon me, I was at that moment repressing a vague fear which seemed prophetic.”

“And that—”

“Was that we should meet again, when your opinions on Death and the philosophy of Revolutions might be different.”

“Never!”

“You enchant me, Cousin Rene,” said the old man, who had listened to his relation with delight. “Ah, I see you have proper sentiments of justice and philanthropy. Why did I not seek to know you before? You admire the Revolution;—you, equally with me, detest the barbarity of kings and the fraud of priests?”

“Detest! How could I love mankind if I did not?”

“And,” said the old man, hesitatingly, “you do not think, with this noble gentleman, that I erred in the precepts I instilled into that wretched man?”

“Erred! Was Socrates to blame if Alcibiades was an adulterer and a traitor?”

“You hear him, you hear him! But Socrates had also a Plato; henceforth you shall be a Plato to me. You hear him?” exclaimed the old man, turning to the stranger.

But the latter was at the threshold. Who shall argue with the most stubborn of all bigotries,—the fanaticism of unbelief?