The Revolt of the Angels - 01

THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE
IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
EDITED BY FREDERIC CHAPMAN
THE REVOLT OF THE ANGELS

THE REVOLT
OF THE ANGELS
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
A TRANSLATION BY
MRS. WILFRID JACKSON

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
MCMXXIV

Copyright, 1914,
by
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN U. S. A


THE REVOLT OF THE ANGELS


THE REVOLT OF THE ANGELS

CHAPTER I
CONTAINING IN A FEW LINES THE HISTORY OF A FRENCH FAMILY
FROM 1789 TO THE PRESENT DAY

Beneath the shadow of St. Sulpice the ancient mansion of the d'Esparvieu
family rears its austere three stories between a moss-grown fore-court
and a garden hemmed in, as the years have elapsed, by ever loftier and
more intrusive buildings, wherein, nevertheless, two tall chestnut trees
still lift their withered heads.
Here from 1825 to 1857 dwelt the great man of the family, Alexandre
Bussart d'Esparvieu, Vice-President of the Council of State under the
Government of July, Member of the Academy of Moral and Political
Sciences, and author of an _Essay on the Civil and Religious
Institutions of Nations_, in three octavo volumes, a work unfortunately
left incomplete.
This eminent theorist of a Liberal monarchy left as heir to his name his
fortune and his fame, Fulgence-Adolphe Bussart d'Esparvieu, senator
under the Second Empire, who added largely to his patrimony by buying
land over which the Avenue de l'Impératice was destined ultimately to
pass, and who made a remarkable speech in favour of the temporal power
of the popes.
Fulgence had three sons. The eldest, Marc-Alexandre, entering the army,
made a splendid career for himself: he was a good speaker. The second,
Gaétan, showing no particular aptitude for anything, lived mostly in the
country, where he hunted, bred horses, and devoted himself to music and
painting. The third son, René, destined from his childhood for the law,
resigned his deputyship to avoid complicity in the Ferry decrees against
the religious orders; and later, perceiving the revival under the
presidency of Monsieur Fallières of the days of Decius and Diocletian,
put his knowledge and zeal at the service of the persecuted Church.
From the Concordat of 1801 down to the closing years of the Second
Empire all the d'Esparvieus attended mass for the sake of example.
Though sceptics in their inmost hearts, they looked upon religion as an
instrument of government.
Mark and René were the first of their race to show any sign of sincere
devotion. The General, when still a colonel, had dedicated his regiment
to the Sacred Heart, and he practised his faith with a fervour
remarkable even in a soldier, though we all know that piety, daughter of
Heaven, has marked out the hearts of the generals of the Third Republic
as her chosen dwelling-place on earth.
Faith has its vicissitudes. Under the old order the masses were
believers, not so the aristocracy or the educated middle class. Under
the First Empire the army from top to bottom was entirely irreligious.
To-day the masses believe nothing. The middle classes wish to believe,
and succeed at times, as did Marc and René d'Esparvieu. Their brother
Gaétan, on the contrary, the country gentleman, failed to attain to
faith. He was an agnostic, a term commonly employed by the modish to
avoid the odious one of freethinker. And he openly declared himself an
agnostic, contrary to the admirable custom which deems it better to
withhold the avowal.
In the century in which we live there are so many modes of belief and of
unbelief that future historians will have difficulty in finding their
way about. But are we any more successful in disentangling the condition
of religious beliefs in the time of Symmachus or of Ambrose?
A fervent Christian, René d'Esparvieu was deeply attached to the liberal
ideas his ancestors had transmitted to him as a sacred heritage.
Compelled to oppose a Jacobin and atheistical Republic, he still called
himself Republican. And it was in the name of liberty that he demanded
the independence and sovereignty of the Church.
During the long debates on the Separation and the quarrels over the
Inventories, the synods of the bishops and the assemblies of the
faithful were held in his house. While the most authoritatively
accredited leaders of the Catholic party: prelates, generals, senators,
deputies, journalists, were met together in the big green drawing-room,
and every soul present turned towards Rome with a tender submission or
enforced obedience; while Monsieur d'Esparvieu, his elbow on the marble
chimney-piece, opposed civil law to canon law, and protested eloquently
against the spoliation of the Church of France, two faces of other days,
immobile and speechless, looked down on the modern crowd; on the right
of the fire-place, painted by David, was Romain Bussart, a
working-farmer at Esparvieu in shirt-sleeves and drill trousers, with a
rough-and-ready air not untouched with cunning. He had good reason to
smile: the worthy man laid the foundation of the family fortunes when he
bought Church lands. On the left, painted by Gérard in full-dress
bedizened with orders, was the peasant's son, Baron Emile Bussart
d'Esparvieu, prefect under the Empire, Keeper of the Great Seal under
Charles X, who died in 1837, churchwarden of his parish, with couplets
from _La Pucelle_ on his lips.
René d'Esparvieu married in 1888 Marie-Antoinette Coupelle, daughter of
Baron Coupelle, ironmaster at Blainville (Haute Loire). Madame René
d'Esparvieu had been president since 1903 of the Society of Christian
Mothers. These perfect spouses, having married off their eldest daughter
in 1908, had three children still at home--a girl and two boys.
Léon, the younger, aged seven, had a room next to his mother and his
sister Berthe. Maurice, the elder, lived in a little pavilion comprising
two rooms at the bottom of the garden. The young man thus gained a
freedom which enabled him to endure family life. He was rather
good-looking, smart without too much pretence, and the faint smile which
merely raised one corner of his mouth did not lack charm.
At twenty-five Maurice possessed the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Doubting
whether a man hath any profit of all his labour which he taketh under
the sun he never put himself out about anything. From his earliest
childhood this young hopeful's sole concern with work had been
considering how he might best avoid it, and it was through his remaining
ignorant of the teaching of the _École de Droit_ that he became a doctor
of law and a barrister at the Court of Appeal.
He neither pleaded nor practised. He had no knowledge and no desire to
acquire any; wherein he conformed to his genius whose engaging fragility
he forbore to overload; his instinct fortunately telling him that it was
better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.
As Monsieur l'Abbé Patouille expressed it, Maurice had received from
Heaven the benefits of a Christian education. From his childhood piety
was shown to him in the example of his home, and when on leaving college
he was entered at the _École de Droit_, he found the lore of the
doctors, the virtues of the confessors, and the constancy of the nursing
mothers of the Church assembled around the paternal hearth. Admitted to
social and political life at the time of the great persecution of the
Church of France, Maurice did not fail to attend every manifestation of
youthful Catholicism; he lent a hand with his parish barricades at the
time of the Inventories, and with his companions he unharnessed the
archbishop's horses when he was driven out from his palace. He showed on
all these occasions a modified zeal; one never saw him in the front
ranks of the heroic band exciting soldiers to a glorious disobedience or
flinging mud and curses at the agents of the law.
He did his duty, nothing more; and if he distinguished himself on the
occasion of the great pilgrimage of 1911 among the stretcher-bearers at
Lourdes, we have reason to fear it was but to please Madame de la
Verdelière, who admired men of muscle. Abbé Patouille, a friend of the
family and deeply versed in the knowledge of souls, knew that Maurice
had only moderate aspirations to martyrdom. He reproached him with his
lukewarmness, and pulled his ear, calling him a bad lot. Anyway, Maurice
remained a believer.
Amid the distractions of youth his faith remained intact, since he left
it severely alone. He had never examined a single tenet. Nor had he
enquired a whit more closely into the ideas of morality current in the
grade of society to which he belonged. He took them just as they came.
Thus in every situation that arose he cut an eminently respectable
figure which he would have assuredly failed to do, had he been given to
meditating on the foundations of morality. He was irritable and
hot-tempered and possessed of a sense of honour which he was at great
pains to cultivate. He was neither vain nor ambitious. Like the majority
of Frenchmen, he disliked parting with his money. Women would never have
obtained anything from him had they not known the way to make him give.
He believed he despised them; the truth was he adored them. He indulged
his appetites so naturally that he never suspected that he had any. What
people did not know, himself least of all,--though the gleam that
occasionally shone in his fine, light-brown eyes might have furnished
the hint--was that he had a warm heart and was capable of friendship.
For the rest, he was, in the ordinary intercourse of life, no very
brilliant specimen.


CHAPTER II
WHEREIN USEFUL INFORMATION WILL BE FOUND CONCERNING A
LIBRARY WHERE STRANGE THINGS WILL SHORTLY COME TO PASS

Desirous of embracing the whole circle of human knowledge, and anxious
to bequeath to the world a concrete symbol of his encyclopædic genius
and a display in keeping with his pecuniary resources, Baron Alexandre
d'Esparvieu had formed a library of three hundred and sixty thousand
volumes, both printed and in manuscript, whereof the greater part
emanated from the Benedictines of Ligugé.
By a special clause in his will he enjoined his heirs to add to his
library, after his death, whatever they might deem worthy of note in
natural, moral, political, philosophical, and religious science.
He had indicated the sums which might be drawn from his estate for the
fulfilment of this object, and charged his eldest son, Fulgence-Adolphe,
to proceed with these additions. Fulgence-Adolphe accomplished with
filial respect the wishes expressed by his illustrious father.
After him, this huge library, which represented more than one child's
share of the estate, remained undivided between the Senator's three sons
and two daughters; and René d'Esparvieu, on whom devolved the house in
the Rue Garancière, became the guardian of the valuable collection. His
two sisters, Madame Paulet de Saint-Fain and Madame Cuissart, repeatedly
demanded that such a large but unremunerative piece of property should
be turned into money. But René and Gaétan bought in the shares of their
two co-legatees, and the library was saved. René d'Esparvieu even busied
himself in adding to it, thus fulfilling the intentions of its founder.
But from year to year he lessened the number and importance of the
acquisitions, opining that the intellectual output in Europe was on the
wane.
Nevertheless, Gaétan enriched it, out of his funds, with works published
both in France and abroad which he thought good, and he was not lacking
in judgment, though his brothers would never allow that he had a
particle. Thanks to this man of leisurely and inquiring mind, Baron
Alexandre's collection was kept practically up to date. Even at the
present day the d'Esparvieu library, in the departments of theology,
jurisprudence, and history is one of the finest private libraries in all
Europe. Here you may study physical science, or to put it better,
physical sciences in all their branches, and for that matter metaphysic
or metaphysics, that is to say, all that is connected with physics and
has no other name, so impossible is it to designate by a substantive
that which has no substance, and is but a dream and an illusion. Here
you may contemplate with admiration philosophers addressing themselves
to the solution, dissolution, and resolution of the Absolute, to the
determination of the Indeterminate and to the definition of the
Infinite.
Amid this pile of books and booklets, both sacred and profane, you may
find everything down to the latest and most fashionable pragmatism.
Other libraries there are, more richly abounding in bindings of
venerable antiquity and illustrious origin, whose smooth and soft-hued
texture render them delicious to the touch; bindings which the gilder's
art has enriched with gossamer, lace-work, foliage, flowers, emblematic
devices, and coats of arms; bindings that charm the studious eye with
their tender radiance. Other libraries perhaps harbour a greater array
of manuscripts illuminated with delicate and brilliant miniatures by
artists of Venice, Flanders, or Touraine. But in handsome, sound
editions of ancient and modern writers, both sacred and profane, the
d'Esparvieu library is second to none. Here one finds all that has come
down to us from antiquity; all the Fathers of the Church, the Apologists
and the Decretalists, all the Humanists of the Renaissance, all the
Encylopædists, the whole world of philosophy and science. Therefore it
was that Cardinal Merlin, when he deigned to visit it, remarked:
"There is no man whose brain is equal to containing all the knowledge
which is piled upon these shelves. Happily it doesn't matter."
Monseigneur Cachepot, who worked there often when a curate in Paris, was
in the habit of saying:
"I see here the stuff to make many a Thomas Aquinas and many an Arius,
if only the modern mind had not lost its ancient ardour for good and
evil."
There was no gainsaying that the manuscripts formed the more valuable
portion of this immense collection. Noteworthy indeed was the
unpublished correspondence of Gassendi, of Father Mersenne, and of
Pascal, which threw a new light on the spirit of the seventeenth
century. Nor must we forget the Hebrew Bibles, the Talmuds, the
Rabbinical treatises, printed and in manuscript, the Aramaic and
Samaritan texts, on sheepskin and on tablets of sycamore; in fine, all
these antique and valuable copies collected in Egypt and in Syria by the
celebrated Moïse de Dina, and acquired at a small cost by Alexandre
d'Esparvieu in 1836, when the learned Hebraist died of old age and
poverty in Paris.
The Esparvienne library occupied the whole of the second floor of the
old house. The works thought to be of but mediocre interest, such as
books of Protestant exegesis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
the gift of Monsieur Gaétan, were relegated unbound to the limbo of the
upper regions. The catalogue, with its various supplements, ran into no
less than eighteen folio volumes. It was quite up to date, and the
library was in perfect order. Monsieur Julien Sariette, archivist and
palæographer, who, being poor and retiring, used to make his living by
teaching, became, in 1895, tutor to young Maurice on the recommendation
of the Bishop of Agra, and with scarcely an interval found himself
curator of the Bibliothèque Esparvienne. Endowed with business-like
energy and dogged patience, Monsieur Sariette himself classified all the
members of this vast body. The system he invented and put into practice
was so complicated, the labels he put on the books were made up of so
many capital letters and small letters, both Latin and Greek, so many
Arabic and Roman numerals, asterisks, double asterisks, triple
asterisks, and those signs which in arithmetic express powers and roots,
that the mere study of it would have involved more time and labour than
would have been required for the complete mastery of algebra, and as no
one could be found who would give the hours, that might be more
profitably employed in discovering the law of numbers, to the solving
of these cryptic symbols, Monsieur Sariette remained the only one
capable of finding his way among the intricacies of his system, and
without his help it had become an utter impossibility to discover, among
the three hundred and sixty thousand volumes confided to his care, the
particular volume one happened to require. Such was the result of his
labours. Far from complaining about it, he experienced on the contrary a
lively satisfaction.
Monsieur Sariette loved his library. He loved it with a jealous love. He
was there every day at seven o'clock in the morning busy cataloguing at
a huge mahogany desk. The slips in his handwriting filled an enormous
case standing by his side surmounted by a plaster bust of Alexandre
d'Esparvieu. Alexandre wore his hair brushed straight back, and had a
sublime look on his face. Like Chateaubriand, he affected little
feathery side whiskers. His lips were pursed, his bosom bare. Punctually
at midday Monsieur Sariette used to sally forth to lunch at a _crèmerie_
in the narrow gloomy Rue des Canettes. It was known as the _Crèmerie des
Quatre Évêques_, and had once been the haunt of Baudelaire, Theodore de
Banville, Charles Asselineau, and a certain grandee of Spain who had
translated the "Mysteries of Paris" into the language of the
_conquistadores_. And the ducks that paddled so nicely on the old stone
sign which gave its name to the street used to recognize Monsieur
Sariette. At a quarter to one, to the very minute, he went back to his
library, where he remained until seven o'clock. He then again betook
himself to the _Quatre Évêques_, and sat down to his frugal dinner, with
its crowning glory of stewed prunes. Every evening, after dinner, his
crony, Monsieur Guinardon, universally known as Père Guinardon, a
scene-painter and picture-restorer, who used to do work for churches,
would come from his garret in the Rue Princesse to have his coffee and
liqueur at the _Quatre Évêques_, and the two friends would play their
game of dominoes.
Old Guinardon, who was like some rugged old tree still full of sap, was
older than he could bring himself to believe. He had known Chenavard.
His chastity was positively ferocious, and he was for ever denouncing
the impurities of neo-paganism in language of alarming obscenity. He
loved talking. Monsieur Sariette was a ready listener. Old Guinardon's
favourite subject was the Chapelle des Anges in St. Sulpice, in which
the paintings were peeling off the walls, and which he was one day to
restore; when, that is, it should please God, for, since the Separation,
the churches belonged solely to God, and no one would undertake the
responsibility of even the most urgent repairs. But old Guinardon
demanded no salary.
"Michael is my patron saint," he said. "And I have a special devotion
for the Holy Angels."
After they had had their game of dominoes, Monsieur Sariette, very thin
and small, and old Guinardon, sturdy as an oak, hirsute as a lion, and
tall as a Saint Christopher, went off chatting away side by side across
the Place Saint Sulpice, heedless of whether the night were fine or
stormy. Monsieur Sariette always went straight home, much to the regret
of the painter, who was a gossip and a nightbird.
The following day, as the clock struck seven, Monsieur Sariette would
take up his place in the library, and resume his cataloguing. As he sat
at his desk, however, he would dart a Medusa-like look at anyone who
entered, fearing lest he should prove to be a book-borrower. It was not
merely the magistrates, politicians, and prelates whom he would have
liked to turn to stone when they came to ask for the loan of a book with
an air of authority bred of their familiarity with the master of the
house. He would have done as much to Monsieur Gaétan, the library's
benefactor, when he wanted some gay or scandalous old volume wherewith
to beguile a wet day in the country. He would have meted out similar
treatment to Madame René d'Esparvieu, when she came to look for a book
to read to her sick poor in hospital, and even to Monsieur René
d'Esparvieu himself, who generally contented himself with the Civil Code
and a volume of Dalloz. The borrowing of the smallest book seemed like
dragging his heart out. To refuse a volume even to such as had the most
incontestable right to it, Monsieur Sariette would invent countless
far-fetched or clumsy fibs, and did not even shrink from slandering
himself as curator or from casting doubts on his own vigilance by saying
that such and such a book was mislaid or lost, when a moment ago he had
been gloating over that very volume or pressing it to his bosom. And
when ultimately forced to part with a volume he would take it back a
score of times from the borrower before he finally relinquished it.
He was always in agony lest one of the objects confided to his care
should escape him. As the guardian of three hundred and sixty thousand
volumes, he had three hundred and sixty thousand reasons for alarm.
Sometimes he woke at night bathed in sweat, and uttering a cry of fear,
because he had dreamed he had seen a gap on one of the shelves of his
bookcases. It seemed to him a monstrous, unheard-of, and most grievous
thing that a volume should leave its habitat. This noble rapacity
exasperated Monsieur René d'Esparvieu, who, failing to understand the
good qualities of his paragon of a librarian, called him an old maniac.
Monsieur Sariette knew nought of this injustice, but he would have
braved the cruellest misfortune and endured opprobrium and insult to
safeguard the integrity of his trust. Thanks to his assiduity, his
vigilance and zeal, or, in a word, to his love, the Esparvienne library
had not lost so much as a single leaflet under his supervision during
the sixteen years which had now rolled by, this ninth of September,
1912.


CHAPTER III
WHEREIN THE MYSTERY BEGINS

At seven o'clock on the evening of that day, having as usual replaced
all the books which had been taken from their shelves, and having
assured himself that he was leaving everything in good order, he quitted
the library, double-locking the door after him. According to his usual
habit, he dined at the _Crèmerie des Quatre Évêques_, read his
newspaper, _La Croix_, and at ten o'clock went home to his little house
in the Rue du Regard. The good man had no trouble and no presentiment of
evil; his sleep was peaceful. The next morning at seven o'clock to the
minute, he entered the little room leading to the library, and,
according to his daily habit, doffed his grand frock-coat, and taking
down an old one which hung in a cupboard over his washstand, put it on.
Then he went in to his workroom, where for sixteen years he had been
cataloguing six days out of the seven, under the lofty gaze of Alexandre
d'Esparvieu. Preparing to make a round of the various rooms, he entered
the first and largest, which contained works on theology and religion
in huge cupboards whose cornices were adorned with bronze-coloured busts
of poets and orators of ancient days.
Two enormous globes representing the earth and the heavens filled the
window-embrasures. But at his first step Monsieur Sariette stopped dead,
stupefied, powerless alike to doubt or to credit what his eyes beheld.
On the blue cloth cover of the writing-table books lay scattered about
pell-mell, some lying flat, some standing upright. A number of quartos
were heaped up in a tottering pile. Two Greek lexicons, one inside the
other, formed a single being more monstrous in shape than the human
couples of the divine Plato. A gilt-edged folio was all a-gape, showing
three of its leaves disgracefully dog's-eared.
Having, after an interval of some moments, recovered from his profound
amazement, the librarian went up to the table and recognised in the
confused mass his most valuable Hebrew, French, and Latin Bibles, a
unique Talmud, Rabbinical treatises printed and in manuscript, Aramaic
and Samaritan texts and scrolls from the synagogues--in fine, the most
precious relics of Israel all lying in a disordered heap, gaping and
crumpled.
Monsieur Sariette found himself confronted with an inexplicable
phenomenon; nevertheless he sought to account for it. How eagerly he
would have welcomed the idea that Monsieur Gaétan, who, being a
thoroughly unprincipled man, presumed on the right gained him by his
fatal liberality towards the library to rummage there unhindered during
his sojourns in Paris, had been the author of this terrible disorder.
But Monsieur Gaétan was away travelling in Italy. After pondering for
some minutes Monsieur Sariette's next supposition was that Monsieur René
d'Esparvieu had entered the library late in the evening with the keys of
his manservant Hippolyte, who, for the past twenty-five years, had
looked after the second floor and the attics. Monsieur René d'Esparvieu,
however, never worked at night, and did not read Hebrew. Perhaps,
thought Monsieur Sariette, perhaps he had brought or allowed to be
brought to this room some priest, or Jerusalem monk, on his way through
Paris; some Oriental _savant_ given to scriptural exegesis. Monsieur
Sariette next wondered whether the Abbé Patouille, who had an enquiring
mind, and also a habit of dog's-earing his books, had, peradventure,
flung himself on these talmudic and biblical texts, fired with sudden
zeal to lay bare the soul of Shem. He even asked himself for a moment
whether Hippolyte, the old manservant, who had swept and dusted the
library for a quarter of a century, and had been slowly poisoned by the
dust of accumulated knowledge, had allowed his curiosity to get the
better of him, and had been there during the night, ruining his eyesight
and his reason, and losing his soul poring by moonlight over these
undecipherable symbols. Monsieur Sariette even went so far as to imagine
that young Maurice, on leaving his club or some nationalist meeting,
might have torn these Jewish volumes from their shelves, out of hatred
for old Jacob and his modern posterity; for this young man of family was
a declared anti-semite, and only consorted with those Jews who were as
anti-semitic as himself. It was giving a very free rein to his
imagination, but Monsieur Sariette's brain could not rest, and went
wandering about among speculations of the wildest extravagance.
Impatient to know the truth, the zealous guardian of the library called
the manservant.
Hippolyte knew nothing. The porter at the lodge could not furnish any
clue. None of the domestics had heard a sound. Monsieur Sariette went
down to the study of Monsieur René d'Esparvieu, who received him in
nightcap and dressing-gown, listened to his story with the air of a
serious man bored with idle chatter, and dismissed him with words which
conveyed a cruel implication of pity.
"Do not worry, my good Monsieur Sariette; be sure that the books were
lying where you left them last night."
Monsieur Sariette reiterated his enquiries a score of times, discovered
nothing, and suffered such anxiety that sleep entirely forsook him.
When, on the following day at seven o'clock he entered the room with
the busts and globes, and saw that all was in order, he heaved a sigh of
relief. Then suddenly his heart beat fit to burst. He had just seen
lying flat on the mantelpiece a paper-bound volume, a modern work, the
boxwood paper-knife which had served to cut its pages still thrust
between the leaves. It was a dissertation on the two parallel versions
of Genesis, a work which Monsieur Sariette had relegated to the attic,
and which had never left it up to now, no one in Monsieur d'Esparvieu's
circle having had the curiosity to differentiate between the parts for
which the polytheistic and monotheistic contributors were respectively
responsible in the formation of the first of the sacred books. This book
bore the label R > 3214-VIII/2. And this painful truth was suddenly