Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) (6 page)

R
AIN
or shine, it’s my habit, about five of an evening, to go for a stroll in the Palais-Royal.
*
It’s me you see there, invariably alone, sitting on the d’Argenson bench, musing. I converse with myself about politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I give my mind licence to wander wherever it fancies. I leave it completely free to pursue the first wise or foolish idea that it encounters, just as, on the Allée de Foy, you see our young rakes pursuing a flighty, smiling, sharp-eyed, snub-nosed little tart, abandoning this one to follow that one, trying them all but not settling on any. In my case, my thoughts are my little flirts. If the weather’s too cold, or too wet, I take refuge in the Café de la Régence,
*
where I pass the time watching the games of chess. Of all the cities in the world, it’s Paris, and of all the places in Paris, it’s the Café de la Régence, where chess is played best. Rey’s café is the arena where the astute Legal, the subtle Philidor, the dependable Mayot mount their attacks; it’s there that you witness the most astonishing moves and that you hear the most stupid conversation; for if one may be both a wit and a fine chess player like Legal, one may also be a fine chess player and an idiot like Foubert and Mayot. While I was there one evening, watching everything, not saying much and listening as little as possible, I was accosted by one of the most bizarre characters in this country, to which God has granted its fair share. He is a composite of nobility and baseness, good sense and irrationality. The concepts of honour and dishonour must surely be strangely jumbled in his head, for he makes no parade of the good qualities which nature has given him, and, for the bad, evinces no shame. He is, what’s more, endowed with a strong constitution, an exceptionally vivid imagination, and an uncommonly powerful pair of lungs. If ever you meet him, and aren’t stopped in your tracks by his singularity, then either you’ll stick your fingers in your ears or you’ll take to your heels. God, what terrible lungs. Nothing could be more unlike him than he
himself is. Sometimes he’s thin and gaunt, like a consumptive on his deathbed; you could count his teeth through the skin of his cheeks. You’d think that he’d gone several days without food, or just come out of a Trappist monastery. The following month he’s fat and paunchy, as if he’d never left the table of a tax farmer, or had been confined in a Bernardine monastery. One day, in grubby linen, torn breeches, and rags, virtually barefoot, he goes about with his head down, avoiding people, and you’d be tempted to call him over and slip him a coin or two. The next, powdered, shod, curled, well dressed, he goes about with head high, he wants to be noticed, and you’d be likely to take him for a gentleman, or near enough. He lives from day to day. Downcast or cheerful, depending on the circumstances. His first concern, on rising in the morning, is to determine where he’ll have lunch; after lunch, he considers where he’ll go to dine. Night brings its own anxieties. Either he’ll return, on foot, to his tiny garret, unless his landlady, weary of asking for his rent, has demanded his key back; or he’ll take refuge in an outlying tavern to await the dawn over a crust of bread and a jug of beer. When he hasn’t a penny in his pocket, which happens from time to time, he resorts to a friend who drives a cab or to a great lord’s coachman, who lets him sleep on the straw, beside the horses. The next morning part of his mattress is still in his hair. If the weather’s mild he spends the night striding up and down the Cours-la-Reine or the Champs-Elysées.
*
Dawn finds him back in the city, dressed in yesterday’s clothes for today, and occasionally for the rest of the week. I hold such eccentrics in low esteem. Others seek out their companionship, even their friendship. As for me, maybe once a year I like to stop and spend time with them, because their character contrasts sharply with other men’s, and they break with that tedious uniformity which our education, our social conventions, and our customary proprieties have produced. If one of them appears in a group, he’s like a grain of yeast that ferments, and restores to each of us his natural individuality. He shocks us, he stirs us up; he forces us to praise or blame; he brings out the truth; he identifies honourable men and unmasks scoundrels; it
is then that the man of good sense keeps his ears open, and takes the measure of his companions.

I knew this one from a long while back. He frequented a household where his talents had made him welcome. An only daughter lived there. He used to swear to the mother and father that he’d marry the daughter. They’d shrug, laugh in his face, tell him he was crazy, yet I saw it actually happen. He’d ask me for a few écus, and I’d let him have them. He’d insinuated himself, by what means I do not know, into a number of respectable houses where he was given a seat at the dinner table, on condition that he never spoke without first asking permission. He would keep silent, and swallow his fury with his food. It was wonderful to see him thus constrained. Should he be tempted to break the treaty and open his mouth, at the first word all the guests would exclaim ‘Oh! Rameau!’ and his eyes would flash with rage as he set about swallowing his food even more furiously. You were curious to learn the name of the man; well, now you know it. He’s the nephew of that famous musician who rescued us from Lully’s plainchant, which we’d been droning out for over a hundred years; who wrote such reams of incomprehensible visions and apocalyptic verities on the theory of music, of which neither he nor anyone else ever understood a word, and who left us with a number of operas where we can enjoy various harmonies, unfinished songs, unrelated ideas, uproars, flights, triumphal fanfares, spears, ennoblements, seditious whisperings, endless victories; he also left us dance tunes that will live forever; he buried the Florentine, and will in his turn be buried by the Italian
virtuosi
; this he foresaw and it made him gloomy, depressed, cantankerous; for no one is as ill humoured, not even a pretty woman who wakes up with a pimple on her nose, as an author in danger of outliving his reputation—witness Marivaux and Crébillon the younger.

He addresses me: ‘Aha! So it’s you, Master Philosopher; and what are you doing here in this company of idlers? Wasting your time too, pushing the wood about?’ (That’s how the scornful refer to playing chess, or draughts.)

ME
: No, but when I’ve nothing better to do, I enjoy spending a few minutes watching those who push it well.

HIM
: In that case, you rarely enjoy yourself; apart from Legal and Philidor, the rest haven’t a clue about the game.

ME
: But what about Monsieur de Bissy?

HIM
: That man’s to chess, what Mademoiselle Clairon is to acting. Both have mastered everything that can be
learnt
about their respective playing.

ME
: You’re hard to please; I can see you’ll allow nothing short of sublime perfection.

HIM
: Yes, in chess, draughts, poetry, eloquence, music, and other such twaddle. What use is mediocrity in those genres?

ME
: Very little, I grant you. But you need a great many people working in them to enable the man of genius to emerge. He’s one in a million. But enough of that. It’s ages since I saw you. I almost never think of you, unless I see you. But I’m always pleased when I do. What have you been up to?

HIM
: What you, I, and everyone else are up to: good and bad, and nothing at all. Also I’ve felt hungry, and I’ve eaten, when I’ve had the chance; after eating, I’ve felt thirsty, and sometimes I’ve had a drink. Meanwhile, my beard’s grown; and when it’s grown, I’ve had it shaved.

ME
: That was a mistake. It’s the only thing you lack to make you a sage.

HIM
: Yes, indeed. My forehead’s high and furrowed; my eye full of passion; my nose hooked; my cheeks broad; my eyebrows black and bushy; my mouth well defined, with full lips; my chin square. If that enormous chin were covered with a long beard it would look very fine in bronze or marble, you know.

ME
: Alongside a Caesar, a Marcus Aurelius, a Socrates.

HIM
: No, I’d feel more at home between Diogenes and Phryne. I’m as shameless as the one and I’m a regular customer of the other.

ME
: And you’re still keeping well?

HIM
: Yes, generally speaking, although not so wonderful today.

ME
: Really? You’ve a paunch on you like Silenus’s; and your face…

HIM
: A face as fat as its posterior counterpart. That’s because the ill humour that’s shrivelling up my dear uncle seems to be fattening his dear nephew.

ME
: Speaking of the uncle, do you ever see him?

HIM
: Yes, in the street, in passing.

ME
: Doesn’t he help you out at all?

HIM
: If ever he helps anyone, it’s without being aware of it. In his own way he’s a philosopher; he doesn’t give a damn for the rest of the universe. His wife and daughter can go ahead and die whenever they like; as long as the parish bells, which will toll for them, continue to sound the twelfth and seventeenth intervals, all will be well. He’s fortunate in that way; and it’s what I value above all else in men of genius. They’re good for one thing only. Other than that, nothing. They don’t know what it means to be citizen, father, mother, brother, relative, friend. Just between you and me, one should imitate them in every way; but not wish the breed to be commonplace. We need men, but geniuses, no. No, my goodness, we don’t need them. It is they who change the face of the world; and, even in the most trifling things, stupidity is so universal and so powerful that it can’t be reformed without a great to-do. Part of their reform is carried out. The rest stays as before; result: two gospels, a two-coloured Harlequin costume. The wisdom of Rabelais’s monk is the true wisdom, for his own peace and that of others: do your duty, after a fashion; always speak well of the Prior; and let the world live as it pleases.
*
This works well, since the majority is content with it. If I knew history, I’d show you that evil has always come into our world through some man of genius. But I don’t know history, because I don’t know anything. Devil take me if I’ve ever learnt a thing—and if, because I’ve never learnt a thing, I’m any the worse off. I was dining one day as the guest of one of the King’s ministers, who’s as clever as they come; well, he proved to us, as clearly as two and two make four, that nothing is more useful to the
common people than lies; nothing more harmful than the truth. I can’t quite remember his proofs; still, the upshot is obviously that men of genius are detestable, and that if, at birth, a child bore on its forehead the stamp of this dangerous gift of nature, it ought to be smothered, or flung into the river with the rubbish.

ME
: Yet those very people, who so hate genius, all consider themselves geniuses.

HIM
: I’m certain that deep down that’s how they see themselves, but they wouldn’t dare admit as much.

ME
: That’s out of modesty. So you’ve conceived a fierce loathing of genius?

HIM
: Which I’ll never get over.

ME
: But I remember a time when you despaired at being only an ordinary man. You’ll never be happy if you find both alternatives equally distressing. You ought to decide what you want, then stick to it. While I agree with you that geniuses are usually odd, or, as the saying goes, ‘you can’t have a great mind without a little madness’, you can’t get away from the fact that centuries that have no geniuses are despised. Men of genius bring glory upon the nations that produced them; sooner or later statues of them will be erected, and they will be seen as benefactors of the human race. With all due respect to the sublime minister you cite, I believe that while a lie may have its uses at the present moment, in the long run it will cause harm, whereas, on the other hand, the truth will necessarily do good in the long run, although it may chance to cause harm at the present moment. From which I’d be tempted to conclude that the man of genius who discredits a commonly held error, or who upholds a great truth, is a man worthy of our veneration. Such a person might possibly be victimized by prejudice, or by the law; but there are two kinds of laws, laws whose equity and universality is absolute, and other, capricious laws, that owe their authority purely to blindness or to the constraints of circumstance. The latter bring only a passing ignominy upon the man who contravenes them, an ignominy which time then
transfers onto the judges and the nations involved, where it remains forever. Which of the two, Socrates or the magistrate who made him drink hemlock, is today the one dishonoured?

HIM
: And a lot of good that did him! He was still convicted, wasn’t he? Still put to death, still declared an agitator, wasn’t he? In showing he despised a bad law, he still encouraged crackpots to despise good laws, didn’t he? He was still a brazen, bizarre individual, wasn’t he? You were almost at the point, just now, of admitting to an unfavourable opinion of genius.

ME
: Listen, my friend. A society ought not to have bad laws, and if it had only good ones, it would never find itself persecuting a man of genius. I never told you that genius was inextricably linked to evil, nor evil to genius. A fool would be more likely to be bad than would an intelligent man. Even supposing that a genius were habitually hard to get on with, difficult, prickly, exasperating; even if he were truly evil, what would you conclude from that?

HIM
: That he should be drowned.

ME
: Calm down, my friend. Now, tell me this: I won’t pick your uncle as an example; he’s a hard man, a brute, devoid of human feeling; a miser. He’s a bad father, a bad husband, a bad uncle; but it isn’t certain yet that he’s a genius, that he’s taken his art a long way, and that his work will still be talked about ten years from now. But what about Racine? Unquestionably,
he
was a genius, yet he was not generally held to be all that good a man. What about Voltaire?