part I
think that this Lake exhales an air which has the property of purifying completely the mind from the embarrassment of the senses; for nothing is presented to your thought by it which does not seem to perfect and instruct you; for which reason I have the greatest respect in the world for those philosophers called Dreamers, whom our ignorant people mock at.
[Footnote 82: We never get this dream.]
I opened my eyes with a start. It seems to me I heard him say:
"Mortal, you have slept enough; rise up, if you wish to see a rarity which would never even be imagined in your world. For an hour since I left you, in order not to disturb your repose, I have been walking alongside the five streams, which flow out of the Pool of Sleep. You may imagine how attentively I have observed them all; they bear the names of the five Senses and flow very close together. Sight seems a forked tube filled with powdered diamonds and little mirrors, which steal and restore the images of everything that comes near, and in its course it circles the Kingdom of the lynxes; Hearing is similarly double, it turns in as many windings as a maze and in the most hollow concaves of its bed can be heard an echo of every noise which sounds about it; I am very much deceived if I did not see foxes cleaning their ears beside it; Smell appears like the two preceding streams divided into two little hidden channels under a single arch; from everything it meets it extracts something invisible from which it composes a thousand kinds of smell, which occupy the place of water in it; on the banks of this stream may be seen many dogs purifying their noses; Taste flows in spurts, which usually only occur three or four times a day, and even then a large coral sluice-gate must be lifted up and underneath that a number of other very small ones, which are made of ivory; its fluid resembles saliva. But as to the fifth, the stream of Touch, it is so vast and so deep that it surrounds all its sisters, even lying full length in their bed, and its thick moisture is scattered far around on lawns completely green with sensitive plants.
"Now you must know that I was admiring, frozen with admiration, the mysterious turnings of all these streams when, as I walked on, I reached the place where they flow into the three rivers. But follow me, you will understand the arrangement of all these things far better by seeing them."
So potent a promise woke me completely; I held out my arm to him and we walked by the same way he had taken along the embankment which retained the five streams, each in its channel.
At the end of about a _stadium_ something as shining as a lake reached our eyes. The wise Campanella had no sooner perceived it than he said to me:
"At last, my son, we are approaching. I see the three rivers distinctly."
At this news I felt myself transported with such an ardour that I felt as if I had become an eagle. I flew rather than walked, and rushed all about, with so eager a curiosity, that in less than an hour my guide and I had observed all that you are about to hear.
Three large rivers water the brilliant plains of this kindling world: the first and the widest is called Memory; the second, narrower but deeper, Imagination; the third, smaller than the others, is called Judgment.
On the banks of Memory there is heard night and day the importunate calling of Jays, Parrots, Magpies, Starlings, Linnets, Finches, and birds of all kinds, which twitter what they have learned. At night they say nothing, because they are then occupied in drinking the thick vapour exhaled from these aquatic places. But their feeble stomachs digest it so ill that in the morning when they think they have converted it into their own substance it is seen to flow from their bills as pure as if it were in the river. The water of this river seems viscous and flows noisily; the echoes formed in its caverns repeat its speech more than a thousand times; it engenders certain monsters, whose faces are like the face of Woman. Others yet more furious are seen with square horny heads very similar to those of our Pedants. These do nothing but exclaim, and yet say nothing but what they have heard other people say.
The river of Imagination flows more gently; its light brilliant fluid sparkles on all sides; when one looks at this water composed of a torrent of damp sparks they seem to observe no certain order as they fly along. When I had observed it more attentively I took notice that the humour that flowed in its bed was pure potable gold and its foam oil of talc. The fishes it breeds are Remoræ, Sirens, and Salamanders; instead of gravel there are to be found those pebbles of which Pliny speaks, which make one heavy when touched on one side and light when applied on the other side. I noticed others again, of which Gyges had a ring, which renders invisible; but above all a large number of philosopher's stones glittered in its sands. On its banks were numerous fruit-trees, principally those found by Mohammed in Paradise; the branches swarmed with phœnixes, and I noticed seedlings of that fruit-tree whence Discord plucked the apple she cast at the feet of the three Goddesses; they had grafted on it shoots from the garden of the Hesperides. Each of these two wide rivers separated into an infinity of interlacing arms; and I observed that when a large stream of Memory approached a smaller one of Imagination the former immediately exterminated the latter; but on the contrary, if the stream of Imagination were larger, it dried up that of Memory. Now, since these three streams always flow side by side, either in their main channel or in their branches, wherever Memory is strong, Imagination diminishes, and the one increases as the other sinks.
Near at hand the river of Judgment flows incredibly slowly; its channel is deep, its fluid seems cold, and when scattered on anything dries instead of moistens. In the mud of its bed grow plants of Hellebore,[83] whose roots spreading out in long filaments purify the water of its mouth. It nourishes serpents, and a million elephants repose on the soft grass which carpets its banks; like its two cousins it splits into an infinity of little branches; it increases as it flows and although it always gains ground turns and returns upon itself eternally.
[Footnote 83: "Black hellebore, that most renowned plant, and famous purger of melancholy, which all antiquity so much used and admired...." Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_.]
The whole Sun is watered with the moisture of these three rivers; it serves to dilute the burning atoms of those who die in this great world; but this deserves to be treated more at length.
The life of animals in the Sun is very long; they only die by a natural death, which never occurs until the end of seven or eight thousand years, when from the continuous excesses of mind to which their fiery temperament inclines them, the order of their matter grows confused; for as soon as Nature feels in a body that more time is needed to repair the ruins of its being than to compose a new one, she tends to dissolve it; so that from day to day the animal is seen, not to rot, but to fall into particles like red ashes.
Death only happens in this way. When he has expired, or rather, is extinguished, the small igneous bodies which composed his substance enter the gross matter of this lighted world until chance has watered them with the fluid of these three rivers; for then, becoming mobile through their fluidity, with the purpose of exercising quickly the faculties which this water has impressed upon their obscure comprehension, they attach themselves in long threads, and, by a flood of luminous points sharpen into rays and are scattered upon the surrounding spheres, where they are no sooner enveloped than they arrange the matter as far as they can in the shape proper to exercise all the functions, whose instinct they acquired in the water of the three rivers, the five fountains and the Pool; and so they allow themselves to be attracted to plants to vegetate; plants allow themselves to be cropped by animals to feel, and animals allow themselves to be eaten by men in order that by passing into their substance they may repair those three faculties of Memory, Imagination and Judgment, whose power they presaged in the rivers of the Sun.
Now, according to whether the atoms have been more or less soaked in the moisture of these three rivers, they bring the animals more or less Memory, Imagination or Judgment; and according to whether, while they were in the three rivers, they absorbed more or less of the liquid of the five fountains and of the little Lake, they elaborate in them more or less perfect senses and produce more or less sleepy souls.
This is approximately what we observed, as touching the nature of these three rivers. Their little veins are to be met with scattered here and there; but the principal arms all debouch in the province of the philosophers; and so we returned to the highway without going farther from the stream than was necessary to get on to the road. We could see the whole time the three large rivers flowing beside us; but we watched from above the five streams winding below us through the meadows. This road, although solitary, is very agreeable; one breathes a free subtle air there, which feeds the soul and causes it to reign over the passions.
At the end of five or six days' journey, while we were delighting our eyes in considering the different rich aspects of the landscape, a languishing voice like a sick person moaning reached our ears. We approached the place from which we imagined it might come and on the bank of the river Imagination we found an old man, who had fallen backwards and was uttering loud cries. Tears of compassion came into my eyes and the pity I felt for this wretch's misfortune compelled me to ask the reason.
"This man", replied Campanella, turning towards me, "is a philosopher in the death agony; for we die more than once, and since we are merely parts of this Universe we change our shape in order to take up our lives again elsewhere; and this is not an evil, but a method of perfecting one's being and of acquiring an infinite amount of knowledge. His malady is that which causes the death of nearly all great men."
His discourse made me observe the sick man more attentively and at the first glance I perceived that his head was as large as a butt and open in various places.
"Come", said Campanella, drawing me by the arm, "all the help we should think we were giving this dying man would be useless and would merely serve to disturb him. Let us go on, since his disease is incurable. The swelling of his head comes from his having over-exercised his mind; for although the elements with which he has filled the three organs or the three ventricles of his brain are very small images, they are corporeal and consequently occupy a large space when they are very numerous. Now you must know that this philosopher so swelled up his brain by piling into it image upon image that, unable to contain them any longer, it burst. This manner of dying is that of great geniuses, and is called _Bursting with Wit_."
We walked on as we talked and the first things which presented themselves to us furnished us with subjects of conversation. I should have liked to leave the opaque regions of the Sun and to return to those which are luminous; for the reader knows that all its countries are not diaphanous: some are obscure as in our world and but for the light of a Sun, which is seen there, would be enveloped in darkness. Now, in proportion as one enters these opaque regions one gradually becomes opaque and on approaching the transparent regions one sheds that dark obscurity under the vigorous irradiation of the climate.
I remember that, apropos this desire which consumed me, I asked Campanella whether the province of the philosophers were brilliant or shadowy.
"It is more shadowy than brilliant", he replied, "for since we still sympathize greatly with the Earth, our native land, which is opaque by nature, we have not been able to settle in the brightest regions of this globe. Nevertheless, when we so desire we can render ourselves diaphanous by a vigorous effort of will; and the greater part of the philosophers do not even speak with the tongue but, when they desire to communicate their thought, they purge themselves by a sally of their fantasy of a dark vapour under which their conceptions are generally hidden; and as soon as they have caused this darkness of the spleen, which darkened them, to return to its seat, their body becomes diaphanous and there can be perceived through their brain what they remember, what they imagine, what they judge; and in their liver and their heart what they desire and what they resolve; for although these little portraits are more imperceptible than anything we can imagine, yet in this world our eyes are sharp enough to distinguish easily the smallest ideas.
"Thus, when one of us desires to show his friend the affection he bears to him, his heart is seen to throw its rays as far as his memory upon the image of the person he loves; and when on the contrary he desires to show his aversion, his heart is seen to project swirls of burning sparks against the image of the person he hates and to retire as far as possible from it: similarly, when he speaks to himself the elements, that is to say, the character of everything he is meditating upon, are clearly seen either impressed or in relief, presenting before the eyes of the onlooker not an articulated speech, but a pictured story of all his thoughts."
My guide would have continued, but he was interrupted by an accident hitherto unheard of: and this was that we suddenly perceived the earth grow dark beneath our feet and the burning rays of the sky grow faint above our heads, as if a canopy four leagues square had been spread betwixt us and the Sun.
It would be difficult to tell you what we imagined at this occurrence; we were assailed by all manner of terrors, even by that of the end of the world, and none of these terrors seemed to us beyond all likelihood; for, to see night in the Sun or the air darkened with clouds, is a miracle which never happens there. But this was not all; immediately afterwards a sharp squealing noise, like the sound of a pulley turning rapidly, struck our ears and at the same time we saw a cage fall at our feet. Scarcely had it touched the sand when it opened and was delivered of a man and a woman; they dragged out an anchor, which they hooked in the roots of a rock; after which we saw them coming towards us. The woman led the man and dragged him along with menaces. When she was near us she said in a slightly excited voice:
"Gentlemen, is not this the province of philosophers?"
I answered that it was not, but that we hoped to arrive there in twenty-four hours, that the old man, who suffered me to remain in his company, was one of the principal officers of that monarchy.
"Since you are a philosopher", replied this woman, addressing Campanella, "I must unburden my heart here before going any further.[84]
[Footnote 84: This episode allows Cyrano to jest a little at some of the absurd sexual ideas of More and Campanella.]
"To tell you in a few words the matter which brings me here, you must know that I come to complain of a murder committed upon the person of my youngest child; this barbarian I am holding has killed it twice, although he was its father."
We were mightily embarrassed by this discourse and so I desired to know what she meant by a child that was killed twice.
"Know, then", replied the woman, "that in our country among other statutes of Love there is a law to regulate how often a husband shall pay his debt to his wife; therefore every evening each doctor goes through all the houses of the district and, having examined the husband and the wife, he allots them so many embraces for that night, according to their good or bad health. My husband here was allotted seven; however, piqued at some rather disdainful words I said to him as we were undressing, he did not approach me all the time we were in bed. But God, who avenges the cause of the afflicted, permitted this wretch (tickled by the thought of the kisses he had withheld from me) to waste a man in a dream. I told you that his father killed him twice, because by preventing him from existing he caused him not to exist, which was his first murder; and he caused him never to have existed, which was the second; while an ordinary murderer knows that the person he deprives of the daylight ceases to exist, but he cannot cause him not to have existed at all. Our magistrates would have made short work of him; but he cunningly excused himself by saying he would have performed his conjugal duty if he had not feared that by embracing me in the height of the anger I had put him into he would beget a frantic man.
"The senate, embarrassed by this justification, ordered us to go to the philosophers and to plead our cause before them. As soon as we received the order to go we entered a cage hung on the neck of the great bird you see there, from which we lower ourselves to the ground and hoist ourselves into the air by means of a pulley attached to it. In our province there are persons expressly employed in taming them when young and in training them for the tasks which render them useful to us. They are principally urged to yield themselves to discipline contrary to their ferocious natures, by their hunger, which is almost always unsatisfied; and so we abandon to them the bodies of all beasts which die. For the rest, when we desire to sleep (for, on account of the too continuous excesses of love which weaken us, we need repose) we send up from the country at regular intervals twenty or thirty of these birds, each attached to a cord and, as they fly up, their vast wings spread in the sky a shadow wider than the horizon."
I was very attentive to her discourse and observed in an ecstasy the enormous height of this giant bird; but as soon as Campanella had looked at it a little he exclaimed:
"Ha! Truly, it is one of those feathered monsters called condors which are seen in the island of Mandragora in our world and throughout the torrid zone; they cover an acre of ground with their wings; but since these animals become larger in proportion as the Sun, which saw their birth, is more heated, it cannot be but that they are of a fearful size in the world of the Sun.
"However", he added, turning towards the woman, "you must necessarily continue your voyage since you have to be judged by Socrates, to whom the supervision of morals has been allotted. But I beg you to tell us of what country you are, because I have only been three or four years in this world and do not yet know the map."
"We are", she replied, "from the Kingdom of Lovers; this great state is bounded on one side by the republic of Peace and on the other by that of the Just. In the country whence I come the boys at the age of sixteen enter the novitiate of Love: this is a most sumptuous palace which covers nearly a quarter of the city. As for the girls, they enter it at thirteen. There they spend a year of probation, during which the boys are only occupied in deserving the affection of the girls and the girls in making themselves worthy of the friendship of the boys. At the end of twelve months the Faculty of Medicine visits this Seminary of Lovers in a body; they examine them all one after another, down to the most secret parts of their persons, and cause them to couple before their eyes; and then in proportion as the male is found by experiment to be vigorous and suitable, he is given as his wives ten, twenty, thirty or forty girls from among those who affect him, provided the affection be reciprocal.[85] The husband, however, may only lie with two at once and he is not allowed to embrace any of them while she is pregnant. Those women who are found to be sterile are employed as menials and impotent men are made slaves and can mingle carnally with the sterile women.[86] For the rest, when a family has more children than it can feed the republic looks after them; but this is a misfortune which never happens, because as soon as a woman is delivered in the city, the treasury furnishes an annual sum for the education of the child according to its rank, and the treasurers of the state themselves carry the money to the father's house on a given day. But if you wish to know more, come into our basket, it is large enough for four. Since we are going the same road we will deceive the length of the way by talk."
[Footnote 85: This is especially aimed at Sir Thomas More: "For a sad and an honest matrone sheweth the woman, be she mayde or widdowe, naked to the wower. And lykewise a sage and discreet man exhibyteth the wower naked to the woman". _The Seconde Booke of Utopia._]
[Footnote 86: "Nel tempo innanzi é ad alcuno lecito il coito con le donne sterile et pregne...." (Campanella, _Città del Sole_.)]
Campanella was of the opinion that we should accept the offer. I, too, was very glad to avoid the fatigue; but when I came to help them weigh the anchor I was very surprised to find that instead of a large cable to hold it, it was hung on a thread of silk as fine as a hair. I asked Campanella how it could be that a heavy mass, such as this anchor was, did not break so frail a thing with its weight; and the good man replied that this cord did not break, because it had been spun equally throughout and therefore had no reason to break at one point more than at another. We crowded into the basket and then pulleyed[87] ourselves up to the bird's throat, where we seemed like a bell hung round his neck. When we found ourselves touching the pulley we fastened the cable to which our cage was hung round one of the lightest feathers of its down, which nevertheless was as thick as a thumb; and as soon as the woman had signed to the bird to start we felt ourselves cleaving the sky with violent rapidity. The condor diminished or increased its flight, rose or sank, at the will of its mistress, whose voice served it as a bridle. We had not flown two hundred leagues, when on our left hand we saw upon the ground a shadow similar to that produced underneath us by our living parasol. We asked the strange woman what she thought it was.
[Footnote 87: Cyrano coined this verb, "to pulley".]
"It is another malefactor on his way to be judged in the province whither we are going; his bird is no doubt stronger than ours or else we have wasted a good deal of time, since he left after me."
I asked her of what crime this wretch was accused.
"He is not merely accused", she replied, "he is condemned to die, because he is already convicted of not fearing death."
"What", said Campanella, "do the laws of your country order that death should be feared?"
"Yes", replied the woman, "they enjoin it upon all except those who have been received into the College of Wise Men; for our magistrates have proved from disastrous experience that he who does not fear to lose his life is capable of taking the life of anyone also."
After some more conversation resulting from this, Campanella desired to know at more length the manners of her country. He asked her what were the laws and customs of the Kingdom of Lovers, but she excused herself from speaking of them, because she had not been born there and only half knew it; for which reason she was afraid of saying either too much or too little.
"I come indeed from that province", continued the woman, "but I and all my ancestors were inhabitants of the Kingdom of Truth; my mother was delivered of me there and had no other child. She brought me up in that country until I was thirteen, when the king, by the doctor's advice, ordered her to take me to the Kingdom of Lovers whence I come, so that by being bred up in the place of Love, a softer and more joyous education than that of our country would render me more fertile than she. My mother took me there and placed me in the House of Pleasure.
"I had great difficulty in growing used to their customs. At first they appeared to me very uncivilised; for, as you know, the opinions we have sucked in with our milk always appear to us the most reasonable and I had only just arrived from my native land, the Kingdom of Truth.
"I did indeed perceive that this Nation of Lovers lived with much more gentleness and indulgence than ours; for although everyone averred that the sight of me wounded him dangerously, that my looks were mortal, and that my eyes sent out a flame which consumed all hearts, yet the kindness of everybody and principally of the young men was so great that they caressed me, kissed me, and embraced me, instead of avenging upon me the ill I had done them. I even grew angry with myself for the disorders of which I was the cause; and, moved by compassion, I one day revealed to them the resolution I had taken of running away. 'But, alas! how will you escape', they all cried, throwing themselves on my neck and kissing my hands, 'your house is besieged by water on all sides and the danger appears so great that without a miracle you and we shall inevitably be drowned'."
"What", I interrupted, "is the country of Lovers liable to inundations?"[88]
[Footnote 88: In spite of M. Lachèvre, I cannot help thinking that Cyrano is making fun of the _précieux_ style in all this.]
"It must be so", she replied, "for one of my lovers (and this man would not have deceived me, since he loved me) wrote to me that his regret at my departure had caused him to shed an ocean of tears. I saw another who assured me that for three days his eye-balls had distilled a river of tears; and as I was cursing (out of love for them) the fatal hour when they saw me, one of those who was numbered among my slaves sent to tell me that the night before his over-flowing eyes had made a flood. I was about to take myself off from the world, so that I might no longer be the cause of so many misfortunes, but the messenger added that his master had bidden him assure me there was nothing to fear, because the furnace of his bosom had dried up the flood. You may easily conjecture that the Kingdom of Lovers must be very aquatic, since with them it is but half-weeping, unless streams, fountains and torrents flow from beneath their eyelids.
"I was greatly troubled to know by what machine I could escape all the waters flowing in upon me. But one of my lovers, who was known as the Jealous, advised me to tear out my heart and then to embark in it; he added that I should not fear it would fail to hold me, because it held so many others, nor that it would sink, because it was too light, and that all I had to fear would be burning, because the matter of such a vessel was very liable to fire; and that I should set out upon the sea of his tears, that the bandage of his love would serve me as a sail and that the favourable wind of his sighs would carry me safe to port in spite of the tempest of his rivals.
"For a long time I meditated how I could put this enterprise into execution. The natural timidity of my sex prevented me from daring it; but at last the opinion I had that no man would be so foolish as to advise it if the thing were impossible, still less a lover to his mistress, gave me courage.
"I grasped a knife, I pierced my breast; already my two hands were groping in the wound and with an intrepid gaze I sought my heart to tear it out, when a man who loved me arrived. He wrested the steel away from me against my will and then asked me the motive of an action, which he called despairing. I related what had happened; but I was very surprised when a quarter of an hour later I learned that he had handed the Jealous over to justice. But the magistrates, who feared perhaps to attach too much importance to the example or the novelty of the incident, sent the case to the parliament of the Kingdom of the Just. There he was condemned to banishment for life and to end his days as a slave in the territories of the Republic of Truth, with a prohibition to all his descendants down to the fourth generation to set foot in the Province of Lovers; moreover, he was enjoined never to use hyperboles on pain of death.
"From that time on I conceived a great affection for the young man who had preserved me; and either on account of this service or because of the passion he had shown me I did not refuse him when, on the completion of his novitiate and mine, he asked me to be one of his wives.
"We have always lived comfortably together and we should still have done so had he not, as I have informed you, killed one of my children twice, for which I am about to implore vengeance in the Kingdom of Philosophers."
Campanella and I were vastly astonished at this man's complete silence; and I was about to try to console him, judging that so profound a silence was the daughter of a most profound grief, when his wife prevented me.
"'Tis not excess of grief closes his mouth, but our laws, which forbid every criminal awaiting his trial to speak except before his judges."
During this conversation the bird continued to advance, when I was astonished to hear Campanella exclaim, with a face filled with joy and delight:
"Welcome, dearest of all my friends; come, gentlemen, come", continued this good man, "let us meet Monsieur Descartes; let us descend, there he is not three leagues from here."
For my