Part 5

"Yes, sir: it was I who tore your ear, in pulling it; and if that little misfortune had not happened to me, it is certain that you would have been to-day six feet under ground. It is I who saved your life, after buying you with my money when you were not valued at more than twenty-five louis. It is I who have passed three days and two nights in cramming charcoal under your boiler. It is my father who gave you the clothes you now have on. You are in our house. Drink the little glass of brandy Gothon just brought you; but for God's sake give up the habit of calling me rascal, of calling my mother 'Good Mother,' and of flinging our friends into the street and calling them beggarly pandours!"

The colonel, all dumbfounded, held out his hand to Léon, M. Renault, and the doctor, gallantly kissed the hand of Mme. Renault, swallowed at a gulp a claret glass filled to the brim with brandy, and said, in a subdued voice:--

"Most excellent friends, forget the vagaries of an impulsive but generous soul. To subdue my passions shall hereafter be my law. After conquering all the nations in the universe, it is well to conquer one's self."

This said, he submitted his ear to M. Nibor, who finished dressing it.

"But," said he, summoning up his recollections, "they did not shoot me, then?"

"No."

"And I wasn't frozen to death in the tower?"

"Not quite."

"Why has my uniform been taken off? I see! I am a prisoner!"

"You are free."

"Free! _Vive l'Empéreur!_ But then there's not a moment to lose! How many leagues is it to Dantzic?"

"It's very far."

"What do you call this chicken-coop of a town?"

"Fontainebleau."

"Fontainebleau! In France?"

"Prefecture of Seine-et-Marne. We are going to introduce to you the sub-préfect, whom you just pitched into the street."

"What the devil are your sub-prefects to me? I have a message from the Emperor to General Rapp, and I must start this very day for Dantzic. God knows whether I'll be there in time!"

"My poor colonel, you will arrive too late. Dantzic is given up."

"That's impossible! Since when?"

"About forty-six years ago."

"Thunder! I did not understand that you were--mocking me!"

M. Nibor placed in his hand a calendar, and said, "See for yourself! It is now the 17th of August, 1859; you went to sleep in the tower of Liebenfeld on the 11th of November, 1813: there have been, then, forty-six years, within three months, during which the world has moved on without you."

"Twenty-four and forty-six: but then I would be seventy years old, according to your statement!"

"Your vitality clearly shows that you are still twenty-four."

He shrugged his shoulders, tore up the calendar, and said, beating the floor with his foot, "Your almanac is a humbug!"

M. Renault ran to his library, took up half a dozen books at haphazard, and made him read, at the foot of the title-pages, the dates 1826, 1833, 1847, and 1858.

"Pardon me!" said Fougas, burying his head in his hands. "What has happened to me is so new! I do not think that another human being was ever subjected to such a trial. I am seventy years old!"

Good Mme. Renault went and got a looking-glass from the bath-room and gave it to him, saying:--

"Look!"

He took the glass in both hands, and was silently occupied in resuming acquaintance with himself, when a hand-organ came into the court and began playing 'Partant pour la Syrie.'

Fougas threw the mirror to the ground, and cried out:--

"What is that you are telling me? I hear the little song of Queen Hortense!"

M. Renault patiently explained to him, while picking up the pieces of the mirror, that the pretty little song of Queen Hortense had become a national air, and even an official one, since the regimental bands had substituted that gentle melody for the fierce 'Marseillaise'; and that our soldiers, strange to say, had not fought any the worse for it. But the colonel had already opened the window, and was crying out to the Savoyard with the organ:--

"Eh! Friend! A napoleon for you if you will tell me in what year I am drawing the breath of life!"

The artist began dancing as lightly as possible, playing on his musical instrument.

"Advance at the order!" cried the colonel, "and keep that devilish machine still!"

"A little penny, my good monsieur!"

"It is not a penny that I'll give you, but a napoleon, if you'll tell what year it is."

"Oh, but that's funny! Hi--hi--hi!"

"And if you don't tell me quicker than this amounts to, I'll cut your ears off!"

The Savoyard ran away, but he came back pretty soon, having meditated, during his flight, on the maxim "Nothing risk, nothing gain."

"Monsieur," said he, in a wheedling voice, "this is the year eighteen hundred and fifty-nine."

"Good!" cried Fougas. He felt in his pockets for money, and found nothing there. Léon saw his predicament, and flung twenty francs into the court. Before shutting the window, he pointed out, to the right, the façade of a pretty little new building, where the colonel could distinctly read:--

AUDRET ARCHITECTE MDCCCLIX

A perfectly satisfactory piece of evidence, and one which did not cost twenty francs.

Fougas, a little confused, pressed Léon's hand and said to him:--

"My friend, I do not forget that Confidence is the first duty from Gratitude toward Beneficence. But tell me of our country! I tread the sacred soil where I received my being, and I am ignorant of the career of my native land. France is still the queen of the world, is she not?"

"Certainly," said Léon.

"How is the Emperor?"

"Well."

"And the Empress?"

"Very well."

"And the King of Rome?"

"The Prince Imperial? He is a very fine child."

"How? A fine child! And you have the face to say that this is 1859!"

M. Nibor took up the conversation, and explained in a few words that the reigning sovereign of France was not Napoleon I., but Napoleon III.

"But then," cried Fougas, "my Emperor is dead!"

"Yes."

"Impossible! Tell me anything you will but that! My Emperor is immortal."

M. Nibor and the Renaults, who were not quite professional historians, were obliged to give him a summary of the history of our century. Some one went after a big book, written by M. de Norvins and illustrated with fine engravings by Raffet. He only believed in the presence of Truth when he could touch her with his hand, and still cried out almost every moment, "That's impossible! This is not history that you are reading to me: it is a romance written to make soldiers weep!"

This young man must indeed have had a strong and well-tempered soul; for he learned in forty minutes all the woful events which fortune had scattered through eighteen years, from the first abdication up to the death of the King of Rome. Less happy than his old companions in arms, he had no interval of repose between these terrible and repeated shocks, all beating upon his heart at the same time. One could have feared that the blow might prove mortal, and poor Fougas die in the first hour of his recovered life. But the imp of a fellow yielded and recovered himself in quick succession like a spring. He cried out with admiration on hearing of the five battles of the campaign in France; he reddened with grief at the farewells of Fontainebleau. The return from the Isle of Elba transfigured his handsome and noble countenance; at Waterloo his heart rushed in with the last army of the Empire, and there shattered itself. Then he clenched his fists and said between his teeth, "If I had been there at the head of the Twenty-Third, Blücher and Wellington would have seen another fate!" The invasion, the truce, the martyr of St. Helena, the ghastly terror of Europe, the murder of Murat,--the idol of the cavalry,--the deaths of Ney, Bruno, Mouton-Duvernet, and so many other whole-souled men whom he had known, admired, and loved, threw him into a series of paroxysms of rage; but nothing crushed him. In hearing of the death of Napoleon, he swore that he would eat the heart of England; the slow agony of the pale and interesting heir of the Empire inspired him with a passion to tear the vitals out of Austria. When the drama was over, and the curtain fell on Schönbrunn, he dashed away his tears and said, "It is well. I have lived in a moment a man's entire life. Now show me the map of France!"

Léon began to turn over the leaves of an atlas, while M. Renault attempted to continue narrating to the colonel the history of the Restoration, and of the monarchy of 1830. But Fougas's interest was in other things.

"What do I care," said he, "if a couple of hundred babblers of deputies put one king in place of another? Kings! I've seen enough of them in the dirt. If the Empire had lasted ten years longer, I could have had a king for a bootblack."

When the atlas was placed before him, he at once cried out with profound disdain, "That France?" But soon two tears of pitying affection, escaping from his eyes, swelled the rivers Ardèche and Gironde. He kissed the map and said, with an emotion which communicated itself to nearly all those who were present:--

"Forgive me, poor old love, for insulting your misfortunes. Those scoundrels whom we always whipped have profited by my sleep to pare down your frontiers; but little or great, rich or poor, you are my mother, and I love you as a faithful son! Here is Corsica, where the giant of our age was born; here is Toulouse, where I first saw the light; here is Nancy, where I felt my heart awakened--where, perhaps, she whom I call my Aeglé waits for me still! France! Thou hast a temple in my soul; this arm is thine; thou shalt find me ever ready to shed my blood to the last drop in defending or avenging thee!"

ACCADIAN-BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN LITERATURE

BY CRAWFORD H. TOY

Recent discoveries have carried the beginnings of civilization farther and farther back into the remote past. Scholars are not agreed as to what region can lay claim to the greatest literary antiquity. The oldest historical records are found in Egypt and Babylonia, and each of these lands has its advocates, who claim for it priority in culture. The data now at our command are not sufficient for the decision of this question. It may be doubted whether any one spot on the globe will ever be shown to have precedence in time over all others,--whether, that is, it will appear that the civilization of the world has proceeded from a single centre. But though we are yet far from having reached the very beginnings of culture, we know that they lie farther back than the wildest dreams of half a century ago would have imagined. Established kingdoms existed in Babylonia in the fourth millennium before the beginning of our era; royal inscriptions have been found which are with great probability assigned to about the year 3800 B.C. These are, it is true, of the simplest description, consisting of a few sentences of praise to a deity or brief notices of a campaign or of the building of a temple; but they show that the art of writing was known, and that the custom existed of recording events of the national history. We may thence infer the existence of a settled civilization and of some sort of literary productiveness.

The Babylonian-Assyrian writings with which we are acquainted may be divided into the two classes of prose and poetry. The former class consists of royal inscriptions (relating to military campaigns and the construction of temples), chronological tables (eponym canons), legal documents (sales, suits, etc.), grammatical tables (paradigms and vocabularies), lists of omens and lucky and unlucky days, and letters and reports passing between kings and governors; the latter class includes cosmogonic poems, an epic poem in twelve books, detached mythical narratives, magic formulas and incantations, and prayers to deities (belonging to the ritual service of the temples). The prose pieces, with scarcely an exception, belong to the historical period, and may be dated with something like accuracy. The same thing is true of a part of the poetical material, particularly the prayers; but the cosmogonic and other mythical poems appear to go back, at least so far as their material is concerned, to a very remote antiquity, and it is difficult to assign them a definite date.

Whether this oldest poetical material belongs to the Semitic Babylonians or to a non-Semitic (Sumerian-Accadian) people is a question not yet definitely decided. The material which comes into consideration for the solution of this problem is mainly linguistic. Along with the inscriptions, which are obviously in the Semitic-Babylonian language, are found others composed of words apparently strange. These are held by some scholars to represent a priestly, cryptographic writing, by others to be true Semitic words in slightly altered form, and by others still to belong to a non-Semitic tongue. This last view supposes that the ancient poetry comes, in substance at any rate, from a non-Semitic people who spoke this tongue; while on the other hand, it is maintained that this poetry is so interwoven into Semitic life that it is impossible to regard it as of foreign origin. The majority of Semitic scholars are now of the opinion that the origin of this early literature is foreign. However this may be, it comes to us in Babylonian dress, it has been elaborated by Babylonian hands, has thence found its way into the literature of other Semitic peoples, and for our purposes may be accepted as Babylonian. In any case it carries us back to very early religious conceptions.

The cosmogonic poetry is in its outlines not unlike that of Hesiod, but develops the ruder ideas at greater length. In the shortest (but probably not the earliest) form of the cosmogony, the beginning of all things is found in the watery abyss. Two abysmal powers (Tiamat and Apsu), represented as female and male, mingle their waters, and from them proceed the gods. The list of deities (as in the Greek cosmogony) seems to represent several dynasties, a conception which may embody the belief in the gradual organization of the world. After two less-known gods, called Lahmu and Lahamu, come the more familiar figures of later Babylonian writing, Anu and Ea. At this point the list unfortunately breaks off, and the creative function which may have been assigned to the gods is lost, or has not yet been discovered. The general similarity between this account and that of Gen. i. is obvious: both begin with the abysmal chaos. Other agreements between the two cosmogonies will be pointed out below. The most interesting figure in this fragment is that of Tiamat. We shall presently see her in the character of the enemy of the gods. The two conceptions of her do not agree together perfectly, and the priority in time must be assigned to the latter. The idea that the world of gods and men and material things issued out of the womb of the abyss is a philosophic generalization that is more naturally assigned to a period of reflection.

In the second cosmogonic poem the account is more similar to that of the second chapter of Genesis, and its present form originated in or near Babylon. Here we have nothing of the primeval deep, but are told how the gods made a beautiful land, with rivers and trees; how Babylon was built and Marduk created man, and the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the beasts and cities and temples. This also must be looked on as a comparatively late form of the myth, since its hero is Marduk, god of Babylon. As in the Bible account, men are created before beasts, and the region of their first abode seems to be the same as the Eden of Genesis.

Let us now turn to the poem in which the combat between Tiamat and Marduk forms the principal feature. For some unexplained reason Tiamat rebels against the gods. Collecting her hosts, among them frightful demon shapes of all imaginable forms, she advances for the purpose of expelling the gods from their seats. The affrighted deities turn for protection to the high gods, Anu and Ea, who, however, recoil in terror from the hosts of the dragon Tiamat. Anshar then applies to Marduk. The gods are invited to a feast, the situation is described, and Marduk is invited to lead the heavenly hosts against the foe. He agrees on condition that he shall be clothed with absolute power, so that he shall only have to say "Let it be," and it shall be. To this the gods assent: a garment is placed before him, to which he says "Vanish," and it vanishes, and when he commands it to appear, it is present. The hero then dons his armor and advances against the enemy. He takes Tiamat and slays her, routs her host, kills her consort Kingu, and utterly destroys the rebellion. Tiamat he cuts in twain. Out of one half of her he forms the heavens, out of the other half the earth, and for the gods Anu and Bel and Ea he makes a heavenly palace, like the abyss itself in extent. To the great gods also he assigns positions, forms the stars, establishes the year and month and the day. At this point the history is interrupted, the tablet being broken. The creation of the heavenly bodies is to be compared with the similar account in Gen. i.; whether this poem narrates the creation of the rest of the world it is impossible to say.

In this history of the rebellion of Tiamat against the gods we have a mythical picture of some natural phenomenon, perhaps of the conflict between the winter and the enlivening sun of summer. The poem appears to contain elements of different dates. The rude character of some of the procedures suggests an early time: Marduk slays Tiamat by driving the wind into her body; the warriors who accompany her have those composite forms familiar to us from Babylonian and Egyptian statues, paintings, and seals, which are the product of that early thought for which there was no essential difference between man and beast. The festival in which the gods carouse is of a piece with the divine Ethiopian feasts of Homer. On the other hand, the idea of the omnipotence of the divine word, when Marduk makes the garment disappear and reappear, is scarcely a primitive one. It is substantially identical with the Biblical "Let it be, and it was." It is probable that the poem had a long career, and in successive recensions received the coloring of different generations. Tiamat herself has a long history. Here she is a dragon who assaults the gods; elsewhere, as we have seen, she is the mother of the gods; here also her body forms the heaven and the earth. She appears in Gen. i. 2 as the Tehom, the primeval abyss. In the form of the hostile dragon she is found in numerous passages of the Old Testament, though under different names. She is an enemy of Yahwe, god of Israel, and in the New Testament (Rev. xii.) the combat between Marduk and Tiamat is represented under the form of a fight between Michael and the Dragon. In Christian literature Michael has been replaced by St. George. The old Babylonian conception has been fruitful of poetry, representing, as it does, in grand form the struggle between the chaotic and the formative forces of the universe.

The most considerable of the old Babylonian poems, so far as length and literary form are concerned, is that which has been commonly known as the Izdubar epic. The form of the name is not certain: Mr. Pinches has recently proposed, on the authority of a Babylonian text, to write it Gilgamesh, and this form has been adopted by a number of scholars. The poem (discovered by George Smith in 1872) is inscribed on twelve tablets, each tablet apparently containing a separate episode.

The first tablet introduces the hero as the deliverer of his country from the Elamites, an event which seems to have taken place before 2000 B.C. Of the second, third, fourth, and fifth tablets, only fragments exist, but it appears that Gilgamesh slays the Elamite tyrant.

The sixth tablet recounts the love of Ishtar for the hero, to whom she proposes marriage, offering him the tribute of the land. The reason he assigns for his rejection of the goddess is the number and fatal character of her loves. Among the objects of her affection were a wild eagle, a lion, a war-horse, a ruler, and a husbandman; and all these came to grief. Ishtar, angry at her rejection, complains to her father, Anu, and her mother, Anatu, and begs them to avenge her wrong. Anu creates a divine bull and sends it against Gilgamesh, who, however, with the aid of his friend Eabani, slays the bull. Ishtar curses Gilgamesh, but Eabani turns the curse against her.

The seventh tablet recounts how Ishtar descends to the underworld seeking some better way of attacking the hero. The description of the Babylonian Sheol is one of the most effective portions of the poem, and with it George Smith connects a well-known poem which relates the descent of Ishtar to the underworld. The goddess goes down to the house of darkness from which there is no exit, and demands admittance of the keeper; who, however, by command of the queen of the lower world, requires her to submit to the conditions imposed on all who enter. There are seven gates, at each of which he removes some portion of her ornaments and dress. Ishtar, thus unclothed, enters and becomes a prisoner. Meantime the upper earth has felt her absence. All love and life has ceased. Yielding to the persuasions of the gods, Ea sends a messenger to demand the release of the goddess. The latter passes out, receiving at each gate a portion of her clothing. This story of Ishtar's love belongs to one of the earliest stages of religious belief. Not only do the gods appear as under the control of ordinary human passions, but there is no consciousness of material difference between man and beast. The Greek parallels are familiar to all. Of these ideas we find no trace in the later Babylonian and Assyrian literature, and the poem was doubtless interpreted by the Babylonian sages in allegorical fashion.

In the eighth and ninth tablets the death of Eabani is recorded, and the grief of Gilgamesh. The latter then wanders forth in search of Hasisadra, the hero of the Flood-story. After various adventures he reaches the abode of the divinized man, and from him learns the story of the Flood, which is given in the eleventh tablet.