A Madman
He died a high-court judge, an upright magistrate whose irreproachable life was held up to honour in every court in France. Barristers, young puisne judges, judges, greeted with a low bow that marked their profound respect, his thin white impressive face, lighted up by two fathomless gleaming eyes.
He had given up his life to the pursuit of crime and the protection of the weak. Swindlers and murderers had had no more formidable enemy, for he seemed to read, in the depths of their souls, their most secret thoughts, and penetrate at a glance the dark twistings of their motives.
He had died, in his eighty-second year, everywhere honoured, and followed by the regrets of a whole nation. Soldiers in scarlet trousers had escorted him to his grave, and men in white ties had delivered themselves round his coffin of grief-stricken speeches and tears that seemed sincere.
And then came the strange document that the startled solicitor discovered in the desk where he had been accustomed to keep the dossiers of famous criminals.
It had for title:
“Why?”
June 20th, 1851. I have just left the court. I have condemned Blondel to death. Why did this man kill his five children? Why? Often, one comes across people to whose temperaments the taking of life affords a keen physical pleasure. Yes, yes, it must be a physical pleasure, perhaps the sharpest of all, for is not killing an act more like the act of creation than any other? To make and to destroy. In these two words is contained the history of the universe, the history of all worlds, of all that exists, all. Why is it so intoxicating to kill?
June 25th. To think that there is a living being in there—loves, walks, runs! A living being. What is a living being? This thing possessed of life, bearing within itself the vital power of motion and a will that orders this motion. It is kin to nothing, this human being. Its feet do not belong to the ground. It is a germ of life wandering over the earth; and this germ of life, come I know not whence, can be destroyed at will. Then nothing, forever nothing. It decays, it is ended.
June 26th. Then why is it a crime to kill? Yes, why? It is, on the contrary, a law of nature. The ordained purpose of every being is to kill: he kills to live, and he kills for the sake of killing. To kill is in our nature: we must kill. The beasts kill continually, every day, at every moment of their existence. Man kills continually to feed himself, but as he must also kill for sheer sensual satisfaction, he has invented sport. A child kills the insects that he finds, the little animals that come his way. But that does not satisfy the irresistible lust for wholesale killing, which is in us. It is not enough to kill beasts; we must kill men too. In other days, we satisfied this need by human sacrifice. Today the necessities of living in a community have made murder a crime. We condemn it and punish the assassin. But since we cannot live without yielding to the innate and imperious instinct of death, we assuage it from time to time by wars in which one whole race butchers another. War is a debauch of blood, a debauch in which the armies sate themselves and on which not only plain citizens are drunken, but women, and the children who every evening read under the lamp the hysterical recital of the massacres.
One would have imagined that scorn would be meted out to those destined to accomplish these slaughterings of men. No. They are heaped with honours. They are clad in gold and gorgeous raiment; they wear feathers on their heads, decorations on their breasts; and they are given crosses, rewards, honours of all kinds. They are haughty, respected, adored of women, acclaimed by the mob, and solely because their mission in life is to shed human blood. They drag through the streets their instruments of death, which the black-coated passerby regards with envy. For killing is the glorious law thrust by nature into the profoundest impulse of our being. There is nothing more lovely and more honourable than to kill.
June 30th. To kill is the law; because nature loves immortal youth. She seems to cry through all her unconscious acts: “Hasten! Hasten! Hasten!” As she destroys, so she renews.
July 2nd. Being—what is being? All and nothing. For thought, it is the reflection of all things. For memory and for science, it is an epitome of the world, the tale of which it bears within itself. Mirror of things, and mirror of deeds, each human being becomes a little universe within the universe.
But travel; look at the people swarming everywhere, and man is nothing now, nothing now, nothing! Get into a ship, put a wide space between yourself and the crowded shore, and you will soon see nothing but the coast. The infinitesimal speck of being disappears, so tiny it is, so insignificant. Traverse Europe in a swift train and look out through the window. Men, men, always men, innumerable, inglorious, swarming in the fields, swarming in the streets; dull-witted peasants able to do no more than turn up the earth; ugly women able to do no more than prepare food for their men, and breed. Go to India, go to China, and you will see scurrying about more thousands of creatures, who are born, live, and die without leaving more trace than the ant crushed to death on the road. Go to the country of black men, herded in their mud huts; to the country of fair-skinned Arabs sheltered under a brown canvas that flaps in the wind, and you will understand that the
