IX
Obverse and Reverse
Doctor Heraclius was very happy during the days following his surprising discovery. He lived in a state of downright jubilation, he was full of the glory of difficulties overcome, of mysteries unveiled, of great hopes realized. Metempsychosis encompassed him like the sky. It seemed to him that a curtain had been suddenly torn down and that his eyes had been opened to things hitherto unknown.
He made his dog sit at table beside him, and in solemn tête-à-têtes before the fire sought to discover in the eye of the innocent beast the mystery of its previous existences.
He realized, however, that there were two dark blots on his happiness—the Dean and the Warden. The Dean shrugged his shoulders furiously every time Heraclius tried to convert him to the metempsychosic doctrine, and the Warden annoyed him with the most uncalled-for jests. These latter were quite intolerable. No sooner did the Doctor begin to expound his faith than the diabolical Warden instantly agreed with him; he pretended he was an adept listening to the words of a great apostle and he invented the most unlikely animal genealogies for every person of their mutual acquaintance. Thus he would say that Laboude, the Cathedral bellringer, from the time of his first transmigration could never have been anything but a melon, and that since then he had scarcely changed at all, being content to ring morning and evening the bell under which he had grown. He pretended that the Abbé Rosencroix, senior curate at St. Eulalie, had undoubtedly been a destructive crow, for he had preserved both its dress and its functions. Then, inverting the roles in the most deplorable manner, he would declare that M. Bocaille, the chemist, was only a degenerate ibis, since he was obliged to use an instrument to administer a remedy so simple that, according to Herodotus, the sacred bird used to give it to himself with no other help than that of his long beak.
X
How a Mountebank Can Be More Cunning Than a Learned Doctor
Nevertheless, Doctor Heraclius continued his series of discoveries without becoming discouraged. Henceforth every animal had a mysterious significance in his eyes. He ceased to see the beast itself in contemplating the man who was purifying himself in its guise; and at the very sight of this invisible sign of expiation he would speculate upon the past sins of the soul dwelling therein.
One day when he was strolling in the Square at Balançon, he saw a large wooden hut from which came the sound of terrible howling, while on the platform a mountebank incoherently invited the crowd to come and see the terrible apache tamer Tomahawk or Rumbling Thunder. Heraclius, much impressed, paid the penny demanded and went in. O Fortune that watches over great minds! Hardly had he entered the hut when he saw an enormous cage on which were written words that flamed suddenly before his dazzled eyes: The Man of the Woods. The Doctor immediately experienced that nervous shiver which accompanies a great mental shock, and, trembling with emotion, went nearer. He saw an enormous monkey sitting quietly on its posterior with its legs crossed like a tailor or a Turk. Before this superb specimen of man in his last transmigration, Heraclius Gloss, pale with joy, stood lost in profound meditation. After a few minutes, the Man of the Woods, divining, without doubt, the irresistible sympathy suddenly produced in the heart of the Man of Cities, who was stubbornly staring at him, began to make such a frightful grimace at his regenerate brother that the Doctor felt the hairs of his head stand on end. Then, having executed a fantastic somersault absolutely incompatible with the dignity of a man, even of a man completely fallen in estate, the four-handed gentleman gave way to the most unseemly hilarity at the sight of the Doctor’s beard. The Doctor, however, found nothing shocking in the gaiety of this victim of former sins. On the contrary he saw in it one similarity the more with mankind, a still greater probability of relationship; and his scientific curiosity became so intense that he resolved to buy this master of grimaces, no matter what the price, in order to study him at leisure. What an honour for himself, what a triumph for the great doctrine, if he succeeded at last in getting into communication with the animal side of humanity, in understanding this poor monkey and making the monkey understand him!
Naturally enough the proprietor of the menagerie was loud in praise of his tenant: he was the most intelligent, gentle, well-behaved, lovable animal that he had ever seen in all his long career as a showman of wild beasts; and to prove his word he went close to the bars of the cage and put his hand inside. The monkey promptly bit it—by way of a joke. Naturally, too, the showman demanded a fabulous price. Heraclius paid it without argument. Then, preceded by two porters bent double under the enormous cage, the Doctor went off in triumph in the direction of his own home.
XI
In Which It Is Shown That Heraclius Gloss Was in No Way Exempt from All the Weaknesses of the Stronger Sex
But the nearer he got to his house, the slower he walked, for a problem, very very much more difficult than that of philosophic truth, was disturbing his mind—a problem which the unfortunate doctor formulated thus:
“By means of
