escaped me during the tale that Jean-Louis told over coffee—he approached me and said: “Did you know him?”
“No, Monsieur; if I had known him, we would have died together.”
I acquired his friendship, and that worthy young man, before returning to Lachapelle in Vaudragon, made me a gift of the portfolio found on Champavert.
This is almost all that it contained: a few whimsical notes, scribbled at random in red pencil, almost totally illegible, and a few verses and letters.
To begin with, I deciphered these pensées on donkey-skin.
* * * *
It is always advisable for men not to do anything futile, of course; but one might as well tell them to kill themselves, for, to be honest, what is the good of living? Is there anything more futile than life? A useful thing is something whose objective is known; a useful thing must be advantageous in itself and in its result, to serve some purpose, at least potentially; in sum, it is a good thing. Does life meet even one of these conditions? Its objective is unknown, it is neither advantages in itself nor in its result; it does not serve, and cannot serve, any purpose; in sum, it is harmful. Let someone prove to me the utility of life, the necessity of life, and I shall live....
For myself, I am convinced of the opposite, and I often repeat, with Petrarch:
Che più giorno é la vita mortale
Nubil’e, brev’e, freddo e pien di noia;
Che pò bella parer, ma nulla vale.20
* * * *
The thought that has always pursued me bitterly, and thrown the greatest disgust into my heart, and this: that one only ceases to be an honest man on the day when the crime is discovered; that the vilest scoundrels, whose atrocities remain hidden, are honorable man, greatly enjoying favor and esteem; that men must often be laughing quietly inside when they hear themselves treated as good, just, honest, most serene highnesses!
Oh, that thought is heart-rending!
Thus, I am reluctant to shake the hands of people other than intimate friends; I shiver involuntarily at the idea, which never fails to assail me, that I might perhaps be shaking a faithless, treacherous, parricidal hand!
When I see a man, I look him up and down and sound him out involuntarily, and I ask in my heart whether he is really, in truth, a man of probity, or a fortunate brigand whose assaults, thefts and murders are unknown, and will be so forever. Indignant and nauseated, with scorn on my lips, I am tempted to turn my back on him.
If men were, at least, classified like other animals, if their various forms reflected their penchants, their ferocity and their bounty, like other animals—if there were a form for the ferocious murderer as there is for the tiger and the hyena; if there were one for the thief, the usurer and the avaricious man, as there is for the kite, the wolf and the fox—it would then be easy to know one’s society; one could love judiciously and one could avoid the evil, chase them away and expel them, as one flees and expels the panther and the bear, while loving the dog, the deer and the ewe.
* * * *
“Merchant” and “thief” are synonymous
A poor man who steals the smallest object out of necessity is sent to the penitentiary, but merchants, who are privileged, open shops on the sides of roads in order to rob the passers-by who stray into them. Those thieves have neither skeleton-keys nor pliers, but they have scales, account-books and haberdasheries, and no one can get out of them without telling themselves that they have just been robbed. Those petty thieves eventually get rich and become “property-owners,” as they call themselves—insolent property-owners!
At the slightest political disturbance they flock together and take up arms, howling that they are in danger of pillage, and slaughtering with a clear conscience anyone who rises up against tyranny.
Stupid brokers—it’s a fine thing for you to talk about property and kill as looters the worthy people impoverished at your counters! Defend your property, then! Unfortunate rustics who, leaving the countryside, have come to fall upon you in the city, like flocks of crows or hungry wolves, to feed on carrion! Defend your property! Dirty dealers, what would you have without your barbaric pillaging? What would you have, if you did not sell brass as gold, dye for wine? Poisoners!
* * * *
I do not believe that one can become rich without being ferocious; a sensitive man never accumulates. In order to be rich it is necessary to have but one idea, one obsession, hard and immutable: the desire to make a heap of gold; and, in order to increase the size that heap of gold, it is necessary to be a usurer, a crook, an inexorable extortionist and murderer, especially maltreating the weak and the small. And when a mountain of gold is made, one can climb it, and from the height of its summit, with a smile on one’s lips, contemplate the valley of despair that one has made.
* * * *
The big businessman steals from the wholesaler, the wholesaler steals from the shopkeeper, the shopkeeper steals from the householder, the householder steals from the laborer and the laborer dies of hunger. It is not people who work with their hands who succeed; it is exploiters of humankind.
* * * *
In a notebook these verses were written, which I presume to be his, being unable to recall having seen them anywhere else.
TO A CERTAIN MORALIST
It is as well, at the height of the pulpit where one is enthroned,
At one’s ease, with a mocking smile,
Festooning one’s utterances and decorating one’s sermons
Not to be lying in one’s heart!
It is as well when one has just said something new,
To rebuke mores and good taste,
Not to go forth to extract one’s parables
From guard-rooms or the gutter!
Above all, it is as well, when a bard puts on
The mantle of the apostolate,
Not to shoot from a balcony of the Louvre
On the populace down below!
But who, then, Brothers, is that rude anchorite?
Who is this surly monk?
This harsh quibbler, this fat man in a biretta,
Who has come to remonstrate with us?
Who, then, is this torturer with the canine muzzle,
Lacerating everything, denying the beautiful,
Sullying art, who says that our age is in decline,
Only good to feed the crows?
Who is he, Brothers? He sings dirty songs,
Drives the people and raises a hue and cry!
On the thresholds of brothels he preaches morality,
Like a drover shouting at his herd!
* * * *
I shall say nothing about the death penalty; enough eloquent voices have condemned it since Beccaria;21 but I shall rise up and proclaim the infamy of the witness for the prosecution, and cover him with shame. Can one imagine being a witness for the prosecution? What horror! Only humankind offers such examples of monstrosity! Is there a barbarism more refined, more civilized, than evidence for the prosecution?
* * * *
In Paris there are two caverns, one of thieves, the other of murderers; that of thieves is the Bourse, that of murderers the Palais de Justice.
1.