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indestructible, and the physicists, we are told, grind to infinity the
smallest speck of dust without being able to annihilate it. If matter is
the property of chance, what harm can it do to change its form since it
can not cease to be matter? Why should God care what form I have received
and with what livery I invest my grief? Suffering lives in my brain; it
belongs to me, I kill it; but my bones do not belong to me and I return
them to Him who lent them to me: may some poet make a cup of my skull
from which to drink his new wine What reproach can I incur and what harm
can that reproach do me? What stern judge will tell me that I have done
wrong? What does he know about it? Was he such as I? If every creature
has his task to perform and if it is a crime to shirk it, what culprits
are the babes who die on the nurse's breast! Why should they be spared?
Who will be instructed by the lessons which are taught after death? Must
heaven be a desert in order that man may be punished for having lived? Is
it not enough to have lived? I do not know who asked that question,
unless it was Voltaire on his death-bed; it is a cry of despair worthy of
a helpless old atheist. But to what purpose? Why so many struggles? Who
is there above us who delights in so much agony? Who amuses himself and
whiles away an idle hour watching this spectacle of creation, always
renewed and always dying, seeing the work of man's hands rising, the
grass growing; looking upon the planting of the seed and the fall of the
thunderbolt; beholding man walking about upon his earth until he meets
the beckoning finger of death; counting tears and watching them dry upon
the cheek of pain; noting the pure profile of love and the wrinkled face
of age; seeing hands stretched up to him in supplication, bodies
prostrate before him, and not a blade of wheat more in the harvest! Who
is it then who has made so much for the pleasure of knowing that it all
amounts to nothing! The earth is dying; Herschell says it is of cold; who
holds in his hand the drop of condensed vapor and watches it as it dries
up, as an angler watches a grain of sand in his hand? That mighty law of
attraction that suspends the world in space, torments it and consumes it
in endless desire; every planet carries its load of misery and groans on
its axle; they call to each other across the abyss and each wonders which
will stop first. God controls them; they accomplish assiduously and
eternally their appointed and useless task; they whirl about, they
suffer, they burn, they become extinct and they light up with new flame;
they descend and they reascend, they follow and yet they avoid each
other, they interlace like rings; they carry on their surface thousands
of beings who are ceaselessly renewed; the beings move about, cross each
other's paths, clasp each other for an hour, and then fall and others
rise in their place; where life fails, life hastens to the spot; where
air is wanting, air rushes; no disorder, everything is regulated, marked
out, written down in lines of gold and parables of fire, everything keeps
step with the celestial music along the pitiless paths of life; and all
for nothing! And we, poor nameless dreams, pale and sorrowful
apparitions, helpless ephemera, we who are animated by the breath of a
second, in order that death may exist, we exhaust ourselves with fatigue
in order to prove that we are living for a purpose, and that something
indefinable is stirring within us. We hesitate to turn against our
breasts a little piece of steel, or blow out our brains with a little
instrument no larger than our hand; it seems to us that chaos would
return again; we have written and revised the laws both human and divine
and we are afraid of our catechisms; we suffer thirty years without
murmuring and imagine that we are struggling; finally suffering becomes
the stronger, we send a pinch of powder into the sanctuary of
intelligence, and a flower pierces the soil above our grave."
As I finished these words I directed the knife I held in my hand against
Brigitte's bosom. I was no longer master of myself, and in my delirious
condition I know not what might have happened; I threw back the
bedclothing to uncover the heart, when I discovered on her white bosom a
little ebony crucifix.
I recoiled, seized with sudden fear; my hand relaxed, my weapon fell to
the floor. It was Brigitte's aunt who had given her that little crucifix
on her death-bed. I did not remember ever having seen it before;
doubtless, at the moment of setting out she had suspended it about her
neck as a preserving charm against the dangers of the journey. Suddenly I
joined my, hands and knelt on the floor.
"O, Lord my God," I said in trembling tones, "Lord, my God, thou art
there!" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]