“If he had not been the learned Doctor Heraclius,” the Warden of the Faculty of Balançon declared, “he would certainly have made an excellent knife.”
He wore a wig, dressed with care, was never ill, loved animals, did not detest his fellow men and adored roast quails.
III
How Doctor Heraclius Used to Spend His Days
As soon as the doctor was up, washed and shaved, and had partaken of a roll and butter dipped in a cup of chocolate flavoured with vanilla, he went down into his garden. Like all town gardens it was not very big, but it was pleasant, shady, full of flowers, quiet and, one might almost say, conducive to thought. In short, if one tried to picture the ideal garden for a philosopher in search of Truth, one would get some notion of the one round which Doctor Heraclius Gloss took three or four brisk turns before settling down to his daily lunch of roast quails. This little stroll, he used to say, was excellent the first thing in the morning; it quickened one’s circulation, numbed by sleep, cleared one’s brain and toned up the digestive organs.
After that the Doctor had his lunch. Then, as soon as he had drunk his coffee—which he did at one gulp, for he never gave way to the sleepiness provoked by the digestive process begun at table—he donned his big overcoat and went out. And each day, after having passed the Faculty and checked the time by his clumsy Louis XV watch with that of the haughty dial of the university clock, he disappeared into the Ruelle des Vieus Pigeons, whence he emerged only to return to his dinner.
What used Doctor Heraclius Gloss to do in the Ruelle des Vieus Pigeons? What used he to do, in Heaven’s name? Why, he sought philosophic truth there, and this was his way of doing so.
All the booksellers’ shops in Balançon were collected in this obscure and dirty little alley, and it would have taken years to read the titles alone of all the out of the way works which lay piled from cellar to attic in each of the fifty hovels which comprised the Ruelle des Vieus Pigeons. Doctor Heraclius Gloss considered the alley, its houses, its booksellers and its books as his own particular property. It often happened that as some bric-a-brac merchant was on his way to bed, he would hear a noise in his attic and would creep stealthily up, armed with a gigantic old-fashioned torch, only to find Doctor Heraclius Gloss, buried to his waist in a pile of books, holding with one hand the remains of a candle which was melting between his fingers, and with the other hand turning the leaves of some old manuscript from which he hoped the Truth would spring. And the poor Doctor would be surprised to hear that the belfry clock had struck nine long since and that he would have to eat a detestable dinner.
He took his research seriously, did Doctor Heraclius.
He had plumbed the depths of all philosophies, ancient and modern; he had studied the sects of India and the religions of the Negroes of Africa; there was no tribe, however insignificant, among the barbarians of the north or the savages of the south whose superstitions he had not sounded. But alas! alas! the more he used to study, to search, to investigate and meditate, the more undecided he became.
“My friend,” said he to the Warden one evening, “how much happier than we are men like Columbus who launch themselves across the seas in search of a new world! They have only to go straight ahead. The difficulties they have to face are no more than material obstacles which a stalwart man will always surmount; whilst we, tossed incessantly on an ocean of uncertainty, roughly carried away by a hypothesis like a ship by the North Wind, we suddenly encounter, as though it were a headwind, an opposing doctrine, which drives us back without hope to the port from which we started.”
One night when he was philosophising with the Dean he said to the latter:
“How right we are, my friend, to say that truth lives in a well. Buckets go down for fish, but they never bring up anything but clear water. I will leave you to guess,” he added pointedly, “how I would spell the first word.”1
It was the only pun he was ever heard to make.
IV
How Doctor Heraclius Spent His Nights
When Doctor Heraclius returned home he was generally much fatter than when he went out, for each of his pockets—and he had eighteen of them—was stuffed with old books of a philosophical nature, which he had just bought in the Ruelle des Vieux Pigeons; and the facetious Rector would pretend that if a chemist had analysed him at that moment it would have been found quite two-thirds of the Doctor’s composition was old paper.
At seven o’clock Heraclius Gloss sat down to table and as he ate perused the ancient books which he had just acquired. At half-past eight he rose with dignity: he was no longer the alert and lively little man that he had been all day, but a serious thinker whose brow was bent under the weight of deep meditation, like the shoulders of a porter under too heavy a load. Having thrown to his housekeeper a majestic: “I am at home to no one,” he disappeared into his study, and once there sat down before a desk heaped with books and … pondered. Truly a strange
