Read Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master Online
Authors: Denis Diderot
JACQUES
: Fort-l’Evêque! To prison!
MASTER
: To prison. And then what an abominable court case. It was nothing less than a question of marrying Mlle Agathe. Her parents didn’t
want to listen to any arrangement. At daybreak the Chevalier appeared in my retreat. He knew everything. Agathe was devastated. Her parents were enraged. He had been subjected to the most cruel reproaches because of the perfidious acquaintance he had introduced to them. It was he who was the primary cause of their unhappiness and their daughter’s dishonour. The poor parents were a pitiful sight. He had asked to speak to Agathe alone, which he eventually – though not without difficulty – succeeded in doing. Agathe had almost torn his eyes out. She had called him the most odious names. He had been prepared for it and he waited for her fury to subside, after which he tried to bring her to a more reasonable frame of mind.
‘But this girl said one thing,’ added the Chevalier, ‘to which I do not know the answer: “My father and my mother surprised me with your friend. Should I tell them that when I was sleeping with him I thought I was sleeping with you?” ’
He replied: ‘In all honesty, do you think that my friend could marry you?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it is you, you unworthy wretch, who ought to be condemned to do so.’
‘But,’ I said to the Chevalier, ‘it only needs you to get me out of the mess I am in.’
‘And how could I do that?’
‘How? By explaining things as they are.’
‘I have threatened Agathe I would do so, but I certainly will not. It is by no means certain whether it would be of any use to us, but it is absolutely certain that we’d be completely dishonoured. And anyway it’s your fault.’
‘My fault?’
‘Yes, your fault. If you had approved the trick I suggested to you, Agathe would have been caught between two men and the whole thing would have finished in derision. But things didn’t work out like that and now it’s a question of getting out of this mess.’
‘But, Chevalier, could you explain to me one small thing. That is how my clothes were returned to me and yours put in the dressing-room. My God, I’ve thought about it a lot but it is a mystery which totally baffles me. It made me suspect Agathe a little because it occurred to me that she might have discovered the ruse and there was some kind of connivance between her and her parents.’
‘Perhaps you were seen going up. What is certain is that you were hardly undressed when my clothes were sent to me and yours asked for.’
‘It will all come clear in time…’
While we were busy, the Chevalier and I, grieving, consoling ourselves,
accusing ourselves, insulting ourselves and begging each other’s pardon, the Commissioner came in. The Chevalier turned pale and left abruptly. This Commissioner was a good man, as some of them are, and reading over the police report at his home remembered that in earlier times he had studied with a young man who had my name. It occurred to him that I might perhaps be a relation or even the son of this old college friend, as was in fact the case. His first question was to ask me who was the man who had run away as he came in.
‘He didn’t run away,’ I told him, ‘he went out. He’s my close friend, the Chevalier de Saint-Ouin.’
‘Your friend! You have a nice friend there! Do you know, Monsieur, that he is the man who came to warn me? He was accompanied by the father and another relation.’
‘Him!’
‘Himself!’
‘Are you absolutely sure of this?’
‘Absolutely sure. What did you call him again?’
‘The Chevalier de Saint-Ouin.’
‘Ah! The Chevalier de Saint-Ouin, that’s it. And do you know what your friend, your intimate friend the Chevalier de Saint-Ouin, is? A crook. A man on record for a hundred dirty tricks. The police only leave that type of man free to walk the streets because he can sometimes be useful to them. They are rogues and informers on rogues and are apparently more useful in the harm they forestall or reveal than dangerous by that which they do…’
I told the Commissioner my sad story exactly as it had happened. He didn’t see it in any the more favourable light because nothing that could exculpate me could be adduced or proved in any court of law. However, he undertook to call the girl’s father and mother and grill her, to inform the magistrate and to neglect nothing which might help to justify me. But he warned me all the same that if these people were well counselled the authorities could do little.
‘What! Monsieur le Commissaire, do you mean I will be forced to marry her?’
‘Marry her! That would be very harsh, and that wasn’t what I was concerned about, but there will be damages, in this case, considerable…’
But Jacques, I think there is something you want to say to me…
JACQUES
: Yes. I wanted to say to you that you were actually more
unfortunate than me who paid for it but didn’t get my night’s worth. All the same I think I’ll have heard it all if she turns out to be pregnant.
MASTER
: Don’t drop the idea yet. The Commissioner told me that a short while after my arrest she had come to see him and made a declaration of pregnancy.
JACQUES
: And there you were, the father of a child.
MASTER
: Whom I haven’t done badly by.
JACQUES
: And whom you didn’t spawn.
MASTER
: Neither the protection of the magistrate nor all the steps taken by the Commissioner could prevent this affair from following the course of justice. But, as the girl and her parents were of bad repute I didn’t end up marrying in prison. I was sentenced to a large fine to pay the costs of the childbirth and also to provide for the maintenance and education of a child which issued from the actions and deeds of my friend the Chevalier de Saint-Ouin, of whom he was the portrait in miniature. It was a bonny boy to whom Mlle Agathe gave birth without any problems between the seventh and eighth month and who was given over to a good nurse whom I have paid every month until this day.
JACQUES
: And what age is Monsieur your son now?
MASTER
: He will soon be ten. I have left him in the country all this time and the schoolmaster there has taught him to read and write and count. It is not far from where we are going and I am taking the opportunity to pay these people what is owing to them and to take him away and put him to a trade.
Jacques and his master spent yet another night on the road. They were too close to the end of their journey for Jacques to take up the story of his loves again, and anyway his sore throat was far from better. The following day they arrived.
– Where?
On my word of honour, I don’t know.
– And what did they have to do at wherever they were going to?
Whatever you like. Do you think that Jacques’ master told everyone his business? Whatever it was, they did not need to stay for more than two weeks.
– Did it end well or did it end badly?
That is what I still don’t know. Jacques’ sore throat cleared up because of
two cures which he had an aversion to: diet and rest.
One morning the master said to his valet: ‘Jacques, saddle up and bridle the horses and fill up your gourd because we have to go you know where.’
It was no sooner said than done and there they were on their way towards the place where for the last ten years the Chevalier de Saint-Ouin’s son had been looked after at the expense of Jacques’ master. Some distance from the resting-place they had just left the master addressed the following words to Jacques: ‘Jacques, what do you think of the story of my loves?’
JACQUES
: There are strange things written up above. There’s one more child made, God knows how. Who knows what role the little bastard will play in the world? Who knows if he wasn’t born for the happiness or the destruction of an empire?
MASTER
: I say no. I will make a good turner or a good clock-maker out of him. He will get married and have children who will turn the chair legs of this world in perpetuity.
JACQUES
: Yes, if that is what is written up above. But why shouldn’t another Cromwell come out of a turner’s shop? Didn’t the man who had his King’s head cut off come out of a brewer’s shop? And aren’t people saying today…
MASTER
: Let’s leave all that. You are better now. You know the story of my loves. In all conscience you cannot get out of carrying on the story of your own.
JACQUES
: Everything is against it. Firstly the short distance we’ve got left to travel. Secondly I’ve forgotten where I was. Thirdly I have the devil of a premonition… that this story will not be finished, that this story must bring us bad luck, and that I will have no sooner started when it will be interrupted by a favourable or an unfavourable event.
MASTER
: If it is favourable, so much the better.
JACQUES
: I agree, but something tells me that it will be unfavourable.
MASTER
: Unfavourable! So be it, but whether you speak or not, will it happen any the less?
JACQUES
: Who knows?
MASTER
: You were born two or three centuries too late.
JACQUES
: No, Monsieur, I was born at the right time like everyone else.
MASTER
: You would have been a great augur.
JACQUES
: I do not know precisely what an augur is, nor do I particularly want to.
MASTER
: It is one of the important chapters in your
Treatise of Divination
.
JACQUES
: That’s true but it is so long since I wrote it that I can’t remember a word. Monsieur, listen. This is what knows more than any augurs, prophetic geese or sacred hens of the Republic of Rome. It is the gourd. Let us consult the gourd.
Jacques took his gourd and consulted it at length. His master took out his watch and snuff-box, saw what time it was, took his pinch of snuff, and then Jacques spoke.
JACQUES
: It seems to me at present that I see Destiny less darkly. Tell me where I was up to.
MASTER
: The château of Desglands. Your knee was a little better and Denise had been ordered by her mother to look after you.
JACQUES
: Denise was obedient. The wound in my knee had almost closed up. I had even been able to dance on the night of the child. However, every now and then I would suffer the most unheard-of pain. It occurred to the surgeon in the château, who knew a little more than his colleague, that these attacks, which returned so suddenly, could only have as their cause the fact that a foreign body had stayed in the flesh after the extraction of the bullet. Consequently he came into my bedroom early one morning, brought a table over to my bed and when my bed curtains were opened I saw that this table was covered in surgical instruments… Denise was sitting at the head of my bed, crying hot tears. Her mother was standing up with her arms crossed and looking sad. The surgeon took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and took a lancet in his right hand.
MASTER
: You are frightening me.
JACQUES
: I was frightened too.
‘Friend,’ the surgeon asked me, ‘are you tired of being in pain?’
‘Very tired.’
‘Do you want it to finish and keep your leg?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then put it outside the bed so that I can work on it more easily…’
I held out my leg. The surgeon put the handle of his lancet between his teeth, took my leg under his left arm, held it firmly in place, took his lancet again and put the point into the opening of my wound, making a wide deep incision. I didn’t turn a hair, but Jeanne turned her head away and Denise screamed and felt ill…
At this point Jacques stopped his story and took another pull at his gourd. His halts became more frequent as the distances became shorter, or, as the geometricians say, they were in inverse proportion to the distances. He was so precise in his measurements that although the gourd was full on leaving it was always exactly empty on arrival. The Department of Bridges and Highways would have made an excellent odometer of him, and each pull he took from the gourd usually had its own sufficient reason. This time it was to bring Denise back from her faint and to recover from the pain of the incision the surgeon had made in his knee. When Denise had recovered and he was comforted he continued.
JACQUES
: This enormous incision revealed the bottom of the wound out of which the surgeon pulled with his tweezers a very small piece of cloth from my breeches which had stayed there and whose presence was causing my pain and preventing the complete healing of the wound. After this operation my health got better and better, thanks to the attentions of Denise. There were no more attacks and no more fever. My appetite returned and I slept and grew stronger. Denise bandaged me with precision and infinite gentleness. You should have seen the cautiousness and dexterity of hand with which she used to undo my bandage, the fear she had of causing me pain, the way she used to bathe my wound. I used to be sitting on the edge of my bed and she would have one knee on the floor. My leg would rest on her thigh which I sometimes used to press a little. I used to have one hand on her shoulder and watch her do all this with a tenderness which I believe she shared. When my bandaging was finished I would take her two hands and thank her. I did not know what to say to her. I did not know how I could express my thanks. She would stand there, her eyes lowered, listening to me without saying anything. Not a single pedlar passed through the château from whom I did not buy something for her. Once a neckerchief, another time a few lengths of calico or muslin, a golden cross, cotton stockings, a ring, a garnet necklace. When my little present had been bought my problem was to offer it and hers to accept it. At first I would show her the thing and if
she liked it I would say: ‘Denise, I bought it for you.’ If she accepted it, my hand used to tremble when I gave it to her, as did hers when she took it. One day, no longer knowing what I could give her, I bought her some garters. They were made of silk and brightly figured in red, white and blue. That morning before she arrived I put them on the back of the chair which was next to my bed. As soon as Denise saw them she said: ‘Oh, what pretty garters.’
‘They are for my lover,’ I replied.
‘So you have a lover, Monsieur Jacques?’
‘Of course, haven’t I already told you?’
‘No. She’s very attractive, I suppose?’
‘Very attractive.’
‘And do you love her a lot?’
‘With all my heart.’
‘And does she love you too?’
‘I have no idea. These garters are for her and she has promised to grant me a favour which will drive me mad, I think, if she grants it to me.’
‘What favour is that?’
‘It is that I will put on one of these two garters with my own hands…’
Denise blushed, misunderstood what I had said and thought the garters were for someone else. She became sad and made blunder after blunder, looked for everything she needed for my bandage without finding it when she had it under her nose the whole time, knocked over the wine which she had warmed, came close to my bed to bandage me, took hold of my leg with a trembling hand, undid my bandage all wrong and then, when she had to bathe my wound, she had forgotten what she needed for the task and had to go and look for it. She bandaged me, and as she was bandaging me I saw she was crying.
‘Denise, I do believe that you are crying. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Has somebody hurt you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What nasty man has hurt you?’
‘You.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did that happen?…’
Instead of answering me she looked at the garters.
‘Oh,’ I said to her, ‘is that what made you cry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Denise, don’t cry any more. It is for you that I bought them.’
‘Monsieur Jacques, is that true?’
‘Very true. So true that here they are.’
As I said this I gave her both of them but I held one back and as I did so a smile appeared under her tears. I took her by the arm and drew her closer to my bed, took one of her feet which I put on the edge, and raised up her skirts as far as the knee where she held them down with both hands. I kissed her leg and attached the garter which I had held on to, and hardly had I put it on when Jeanne, her mother, came in.