XXIV
Eureka
A visit from the dean and the Warden restored him.
All three talked for an hour or two without mentioning metempsychosis; but when his two friends were leaving Heraclius could not contain himself any longer. While the Dean was struggling into his bearskin coat, he drew aside the Warden, of whom he was less afraid, and confided all his trouble to him. He told him how he thought he had found the author of the manuscript, how he had been mistaken, how the wretched monkey had played a most scandalous trick on him and how utterly in despair he felt. In fact, confronted with the ruin of his illusions, Heraclius broke down completely. The Warden, much moved, clasped him by the hand and was just about to speak when the Dean’s solemn voice calling out “Aren’t you ever coming, Warden?” boomed from the hall.
“Come, come,” said the Warden, with a final clasp of the unhappy Doctor’s hand and the sort of smile with which one comforts a child who has been naughty, “cheer up, my friend. Perhaps after all you’re the author of the manuscript yourself.”
Then he went out into the dark street, leaving the astonished Heraclius on the doorstep.
The Doctor went slowly back to his study, muttering from time to time:
“Perhaps I am the author of the manuscript.”
He made another careful study of the way in which the document had been recovered at each appearance of its author and then he recalled how he himself had found it. The dream which had preceded the happy day like a providential warning, the emotion he had felt on entering Ruelle des Vieux Pigeons—all this came back to him, clearly, distinctly, surprisingly. And then he stood up, spreading out his arms as though he had seen a vision, and cried in a resounding voice:
“It is I! It is I!”
A shiver seemed to pass through the whole house. Pythagoras barked violently, the disturbed animals suddenly woke up and became so excited that it seemed as though each one was bent on celebrating in his own tongue the tremendous resurrection of the prophet of metempsychosis. Then, in the grip of an overwhelming emotion, Heraclius sat down, opened the last page of this new Bible and reverently added to it the entire history of his life.
XXV
“I Am That I Am.”
From that day onwards Heraclius was filled with tremendous pride. In the same way that the Messiah sprang from God the Father, so he had sprung from Pythagoras—or rather he himself was Pythagoras, for in the past he had lived in the body of that philosopher. Thus his genealogy could challenge that of the most ancient families of the nobility. He looked with supreme contempt on all the great men in the history of the race and their highest achievements seemed as nothing beside his. He installed himself in sublime isolation among his worlds and his animals: he was metempsychosis itself and his house was its temple.
He had forbidden both his servant and his gardener to kill noxious animals. Caterpillars and snails multiplied in his garden, and in the guise of enormous spiders with hairy legs onetime mortals paraded their loathsome transformation on the walls of his study—a fact which made the offensive Warden say that if all cadgers, each changed according to his kind, were to settle on the too sensitive minded Doctor’s skull, he would still take good care not to wage war on the poor degraded parasites. Only one thing troubled Heraclius in this superb flowering of his hopes: this was the continual spectacle of animals devouring each other—spiders lying in wait for flies, birds carrying off the spiders, cats gobbling up the birds, and his own dog Pythagoras joyfully mangling any cat which came within reach of his teeth.
From morning till night he followed the slow progressive march of metempsychosis at every degree in the animal scale. He received sudden revelations when he watched sparrows pecking in the gutter: and ants, those ceaseless farseeing workers, thrilled him intensely. In them he saw all the work-dodging, useless people who, as an expiation for their past idleness and nonchalance, had been condemned to persistent labour. He remained for hours at a time with his nose on the grass watching them and was amazed at what he saw. Then, like Nebuchadnezzar, he would crawl on all fours, rolling in the dust with his dog, living with his animals, even grovelling with them. For him, Man gradually disappeared from creation, and soon he was only conscious of animals. When he thought of them he felt that he was their brother; he spoke to no one but them, and when by chance he was forced to talk to men, he found himself as helpless as though he was among foreigners, and was shocked at the stupidity of his fellow creatures.
XXVI
What Was Said at Madame Labotte’s, the Fruiterer’s, 26, Rue de la Maraicherie
Mdlle. Victoire, cook to the Dean of the Faculty of Balançon, Mademoiselle Gertrude, servant of the Warden of the said Faculty, and Mademoiselle Anastasie, housekeeper to the Abbé Beaufleury, Curé of St. Eulalie—such was the respectable coterie which happened meet at the counter of Madame Labotte, fruiterer, 26 Rue de la Maraicherie, one Thursday morning.
These ladies, with their shopping baskets on their left arms and little white goffered caps posed coquettishly on their heads so that the ribbons hung down their backs, were
