Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master (30 page)

JACQUES
: Once upon a time there was a child sitting at the foot of the counter in a laundry, and he was crying with all his might. The shopkeeper’s wife, put out by his crying, said to him: ‘Little man, why are you crying?’

‘Because they want me to say “A”.’

‘And why don’t you want to say “A”?’

‘Because as soon as I say “A” they’ll want me to say “B”.’

As soon as I tell you the name of the little man I’ll have to tell you the rest.

JACQUES
: He was a sort of dwarf, hunchbacked, gnarled, blind in one eye, with a stammer, jealous and lecherous, in love with and maybe even loved by Suzanne. He was the village priest.

Jacques resembled the child in the laundry as if they were two peas in a pod. The only difference was that ever since he had caught a sore throat one had the greatest difficulty to get him to say “A”, but once he had started he would carry on by himself to the end of the alphabet.

JACQUES
: Suzon just had time to get up. I adjusted my clothing and ran off and Suzon told me what happened later. As soon as the husband saw the priest perched on top of the hayloft he burst out laughing. The priest said:
‘That’s right, laugh, you fool.’

And so the husband laughed even more and asked who had perched him up there.

PRIEST
: Lll… ll… let me ddd… dd… down!

The husband carried on laughing and asked how he should go about that.

PRIEST
: Lll… ll… like I ggg… gg… got up here, www… ww… with a ppp… pp… pitchfork.

‘Hell’s teeth, you’re right. That’s what comes of having studied.’

So the husband took the pitchfork and presented it to the priest who straddled himself on it as I’d done with him. The husband then carried him round the barn on the end of it a few times singing a sort of plainchant while the priest was yelling: ‘Lll… ll… let me ddd… dd… down you rrr… rr… ruffian!’

The husband said: ‘Monsieur le vicaire, why should I not show you like this along all the roads in the village? They can’t ever have seen such a pretty procession as this.’

However, the priest was let off with just the threat and the husband got him down. I don’t know what he said to the husband next because Suzon ran away. But a little while later I heard: ‘Www… ww… wretch, you ddd… dd… dare to sss… ss… strike a ppp… pp… priest. I exccc… cc… communiccc… cc… cate you. You will be ddd… dd… damned!’

It was the little man who was speaking and he was being chased by the husband, who was hitting him with the pitchfork. I arrived with a crowd of others. From a long way off the husband saw me, stopped his business with the pitchfork and said: ‘Come here.’

JACQUES
: It was not long after this incident, which my father heard about and also laughed at, that I joined up, as I have told you…

After a few moments of silence, or coughing, on the part of Jacques – according to some – or more laughter – according to others – his master turned to Jacques and said: ‘And the story of your loves?’

Jacques tossed his head and did not answer.

How can a man of wisdom and morality, who fancies himself as something of a philosopher, amuse himself telling tales as obscene as this?

Well, firstly you must remember that these are not tales. It is a true story, and I certainly do not feel more guilty – and perhaps even less – when I write about Jacques’ follies than Suetonius when he recorded for us the orgies of Tiberius. Moreover you read Suetonius without reproaching him. Why do you not frown at Catullus, Martial, Horace, Juvenal, Petronius, La Fontaine and so many others? Why don’t you tell the stoic Seneca: ‘We don’t need to hear about the debauchery of your slave with his concave mirrors?’ Why is it that you are only indulgent with dead writers? If you were to reflect a little on this partiality you will see that it is born of a false assumption. If you are innocent you will not read my work. If, on the other hand, you are depraved, you may read me without consequence. And then if you are not satisfied by what I say, open the preface to the works of Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and you will find my apologia.

Who is there amongst you who dares to criticize Voltaire for writing
La Pucelle
?
⁶⁰
Nobody. So you have, therefore, two standards for assessing the actions of men.

– But, I hear you protest, Voltaire’s
Pucelle
is a masterpiece.

So much the worse since people will read it more.

– And your
Jacques
is nothing more than a tasteless farrago of facts, some real, some imaginary, written without elegance and arranged without order.

So much the better:
Jacques
will be less read.

Whichever way you turn you are wrong. If my work is good it will please you. If it is bad it won’t do you any harm. There is no book that is more innocent than a bad book.

I enjoy writing up under assumed names the follies I have seen you commit. Your follies make me laugh and my writings annoy you. To speak to you frankly, Reader, I find that you are the more wicked of the two of us. How satisfied would I be if it were as easy for me to protect myself from your calumny as it is for you to protect yourself from the boredom or the danger of my work!

Filthy hypocrites. Leave me in peace. Fuck away like unsaddled asses but allow me to say ‘fuck’. I allow you the action. Allow me the word. You boldly use words like ‘kill’, ‘steal’, ‘betray’ all the time but only dare to
pronounce that word under your breath. Might it be that the less you allow such supposed impurities to pass your lips the more they remain in your thoughts? And what has a thing so natural, so right and so necessary as sexual intercourse done to you that you should exclude the word for it from your conversation and imagine that your mouth, your eyes and your ears will be sullied by it?

It is a good thing that the expressions we use least, write least, and repress most are the best known and the most widely understood. Thus the proper term is as common as the word ‘bread’. It is present in every age in every idiom. There are a thousand synonyms in all languages and it impresses itself in each of us without being expressed, without voice and without shape, and the sex which does the thing the most is the one which says the word the least.

I can still hear you exclaiming: ‘Oh! What a vulgar man! Oh! What a cynic! Oh! What a sophist!’

Go on. Heap your insults on an estimable author who is always in your hands and whom I only translate here. To me the freedom of his style is almost the guarantee of the purity of his morals. It is Montaigne.
Lasciva est nobis pagina vita proba
.
⁶¹

Jacques and his master spent the rest of the day without opening their lips. Jacques kept coughing and his master kept saying: ‘That is a terrible cough.’

Then he would look at his watch to see what time it was without being aware of doing so, and then take a pinch of snuff without being aware of it. The proof of this is that he would do these things three or four times in a row in the same order. A moment afterwards Jacques would cough again and then his master would say: ‘That’s the devil of a cough you’ve got there! So you drank so much of our hostess’s wine that you lost your voice. And last night with the secretary you weren’t any more moderate. When you came up you were staggering and you didn’t know what you were saying, and today you’ve stopped ten times and I bet that you haven’t got a drop of wine left in your gourd.’

Then he would carry on muttering to himself, look at his watch and give his nostrils a treat.

I have forgotten to tell you, Reader, that Jacques never went anywhere without a gourd filled with the best wine, which used to hang from the pommel of his saddle. Every time his master interrupted him with a question which was a little long he would unfasten his gourd, throw back his head, raise the gourd above it and pour a stream of its contents into his mouth, only putting it back when his master had stopped speaking. I have also
forgotten to tell you that in moments which required reflection his first impulse was to ask his gourd. Were it a matter of resolving a moral question, discussing an event, choosing one road rather than another, beginning, continuing or abandoning a transaction, weighing up the advantages or disadvantages of a political matter, a commercial or financial speculation, the wisdom or folly of a law, the outcome of a war, the choice of a room, or in a room the choice of a bed, his first word was, ‘Let us consult the gourd’, and his last word, ‘That is the opinion of the gourd and my own.’

When his Destiny was silent in his head, it made itself known through his gourd. It was a sort of portable Pythian priestess, silent as soon as it was empty. At Delphi the Pythian priestess, her skirts pulled up, sitting bare-bottomed on the tripod, received her inspiration from the bottom upwards. Jacques, on his horse, his head turned towards heaven, his gourd uncorked with the neck inclined towards his mouth, received his inspiration from the top downwards. When the Pythian priestess and Jacques spoke their oracles, they were both drunk.

Jacques used to claim that the Holy Spirit had descended on the apostles in the form of a gourd and he used to call Pentecost the feast of the gourd. He even wrote a treatise on all the various types of divination, a profound treatise in which he gives preference to divination by Bacbuc, or by the gourd.
⁶²
He contradicted, in spite of all the veneration he had for him, the curate of Meudon who consulted the divine bottle by its effect on the stomach. He used to say: ‘I like Rabelais, but I prefer the truth to Rabelais.’ He used to call him a heretical engastrimyth,
⁶³
and prove in a hundred ways, each one better than the previous, that the true oracles of Bacbuc, or the gourd, could only be understood through the neck of a bottle. He included amongst the ranks of the distinguished followers of Bacbuc those who have during these last centuries been truly inspired by the gourd: Rabelais, La Fare, Chapelle, Chaulieu, La Fontaine, Molière, Panard, Gallet and Vade.
⁶⁴
Plato and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who recommended good wine without drinking it, are in his opinion two false followers of the gourd. In olden times the gourd had a few well-known sanctuaries, the Pomme de Pin, the Temple and La Guingette, a place of worship whose history is recorded elsewhere.
⁶⁵
He gave the most magnificent description of the enthusiasm, the warmth and the fire with which Bacbucians or Périgourdians were and are still today filled, when, at the end of the meal, with their elbows on the table, the divine Bacbuc or the sacred gourd would appear and be brought down into their midst, would hiss, pop its cork and cover its worshippers in its prophetic foam. His manuscript is illustrated with two portraits beneath which appear
the words: ‘Anacreon and Rabelais, the former among the ancients, the latter among the moderns, sovereign pontiffs of the gourd’.

– Did Jacques use the expression ‘engastrimyth’?

Why not, Reader? Jacques’ Captain was a follower of Bacbuc. He might have known this expression and Jacques, who used to pick up everything he said, might have remembered it. But the truth is that ‘engastrimyth’ is my own word and the original text says ‘ventriloquist’.

– That’s all very nice, you are saying, but what about Jacques’ loves?

Jacques’ loves? Only Jacques knows about those, and there he is tormented by a sore throat which has reduced his master to his watch and his snuff-box – a privation which distresses him as much as you.

– What is to become of us?

My God, how should I know? This would now be an opportune moment to consult the divine Bacbuc or the sacred gourd, but her cult has declined, her temples are deserted. In the same way as the pagan oracles ended on the birth of our Saviour, so did the oracles of Bacbuc become silent on the death of Gallet. And so that was the end of those great poems, no more of those sublimely eloquent pieces, no more of those works stamped with the seal of drunkenness and genius. Everything is reasoned, measured, academic and flat. Oh divine Bacbuc! Oh sacred gourd! Oh divinity of Jacques! Come back amongst us…

There comes upon me, Reader, the need to talk to you about the birth of the divine Bacbuc, of the prodigies which accompanied her and followed her, of the marvels of her reign and the disasters of her retreat from society. And if our friend Jacques’ sore throat continues and if his master stubbornly persists in silence you will have to make do with this story, which I will try and drag out until Jacques recovers and continues the story of his loves.

At this point there is a really deplorable gap in the conversation of Jacques and his master. Someday a descendant of Nodot or of the president of de Brosse or Freinsheimius or Father Brothier
⁶⁶
will perhaps fill it and the descendants of Jacques, or of his master, the owners of the manuscript, will laugh a lot.

It would appear that Jacques, reduced to silence by his sore throat, suspended the story of his loves and that his master started the story of his own. This is only a conjecture, which I make for whatever it is worth. After a few perfunctory lines which announce the gap, one reads the words: ‘There is nothing that is more sad in this world than to be a fool.’

Is it Jacques who offers this aphorism? Is it his master? This could become
the subject of a long and thorny dissertation. If Jacques was not insolent enough to address these words to his master, was the latter frank enough to address them to himself? Whichever it was, it is evident, it is very evident, that it is the master who continues.