Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master (4 page)

JACQUES
: If… if the sea was boiling, there would be, as the saying goes, an awful lot of fish cooked. What the devil, Monsieur, just now you believed that I was running a great risk and nothing could have been more wrong. Now you believe yourself to be in great danger and nothing, perhaps, could be more wrong again. Everyone in this house is afraid of everyone else, which proves we are all idiots…

And while speaking thus, there he was, undressed, in bed, and fast asleep. His master, eating in his turn a piece of black bread, and drinking a glass of bad wine, was listening all around him and looking at Jacques, who was snoring, saying: ‘What kind of devil of a man is that?’

Following his valet’s example, the master also stretched himself out on his camp-bed but didn’t sleep quite the same. As soon as day broke Jacques felt a hand pushing him. It was the hand of his master, who was calling him softly.

MASTER
: What kind of devil of a man are you? Jacques, my friend, I beg you.

Jacques rubbed his eyes, yawned several times, stretched out his arms, got up, dressed without hurrying, pushed back the beds, went out of the bedroom, went downstairs, went to the stable, saddled and bridled the horses, woke up the innkeeper, who was still asleep, paid the bill, kept the keys to the two bedrooms, and there they were, gone.

The master wanted to get away at a fast trot. Jacques wanted to go at walking pace, still following his system. When they were quite a good way from their miserable resting-place the master, hearing something jangling in Jacques’ pocket, asked him what it was. Jacques told him it was the two keys to the bedrooms.

JACQUES
: Because, without knowing what is written up above, none of us knows what we want or what we are doing, and we follow our whims which we call reason, or our reason which is often nothing but a dangerous whim which sometimes turns out well, sometimes badly.

My Captain used to believe that prudence is a supposition in which experience justifies us interpreting the circumstances in which we find ourselves as the cause of certain effects which are to be desired or feared in the future.

MASTER
: There are a number of things one could say about that…

At this point they heard a lot of noise and shouting coming from some distance behind them. They looked round and saw a band of men armed with sticks and forks coming towards them as fast as they could run. You are going to believe that it was the people from the inn and their servants and the brigands we have spoken of. You are going to believe that in the morning they broke down their doors since they didn’t have the keys and that these brigands thought that our travellers had decamped with their possessions. That is what Jacques thought and he said between his teeth: ‘Damn the keys and damn the fantasy or reason which made me take them. Damn prudence, etc. etc.!’

You are going to believe that this little army will fall upon Jacques and his master, that there will be a bloody fight, blows with sticks and pistol shots, and if I wanted to I could make all of these things happen, but then it would be goodbye to the truth of the story and goodbye to the story of Jacques’ loves.

Our two travellers were not followed. I do not know what happened in the inn after they left. They carried on their way still going without knowing where they were going although they knew more or less where they wanted to go, relieving their boredom and fatigue by silence and conversation, as is the custom of those who walk, and sometimes of those who are sitting down.

It is quite obvious that I am not writing a novel since I am neglecting those things which a novelist would not fail to use. The person who takes what I write for the truth might perhaps be less wrong than the person who takes it for a fiction.

This time it was the master who spoke first, and he started with the usual refrain: ‘Well now, Jacques, the story of your loves?’

JACQUES
: Very good. The most pressing thing was to get hold of a surgeon and there wasn’t one within less than a league. The peasant put one of his children on a horse and sent him off to the nearest one. Meanwhile the peasant’s wife had heated up some table wine, torn up one of her husband’s old shirts and my knee was cleaned, covered with compresses and wrapped in linen. They put a few pieces of sugar they had saved from the ants into part of the wine which had been used for the bandage and I drank it down. Next they told me to be patient. It was late. The family sat down to table and had supper. Supper was finished and the child had still not come back and there was no surgeon. The father became angry. He was a naturally ill-tempered man. He sulked at his wife and found nothing to his liking. In a temper he sent the other children to bed. His wife sat down on a wooden seat and took up her distaff. He paced up and down and as he was pacing up and down he tried to pick an argument on any pretext.

‘If you’d gone to the mill like I told you to…’, and he finished the sentence shaking his head in the direction of my bed.

‘I’ll go tomorrow.’

‘It’s today that you should have gone like I told you to… And what about those bits of straw left on the floor of the barn? What are you waiting for to pick them up?’

‘It will be done tomorrow.’

‘But what we’ve got left is almost finished and you’d have done much better to pick them up today like I told you to… And that heap of barley that’s rotting in the loft? I’ll wager you didn’t think to turn it?’

‘The children did it.’

‘You should have done it yourself. If you had been up in your loft you wouldn’t have been at the door…’

At that moment a surgeon arrived, and then a second surgeon and then a third with the little boy from the cottage.

JACQUES
: The first was away when the little boy arrived at his house, but his wife had passed word to the second and the third had come back with the little boy.

‘Good evening, friends, what are you doing here?’ said the first to the others.

They had come as quickly as they could and were hot and thirsty. They sat down around the table which still had the table-cloth on it. The wife went down to the cellar and came up again with a bottle. The husband was muttering under his breath: ‘What the devil was she doing at the door?’

They drank, chatted about the illnesses of the neighbourhood, and started listing all the people they were treating. I started complaining. They said: ‘We’ll be with you in a moment.’

After the first bottle they asked for a second, on account, for my treatment, then a third, then a fourth, still on account, for my treatment. And with every bottle, the husband came back to his first cry: ‘What the devil was she doing at the door?’

What a scene anybody else would have made of these three surgeons, of their conversation on the fourth bottle, of the multitude of their marvellous cures, of the impatience of Jacques and the bad temper of their host, of what our country Aesculapiuses had to say as they clustered round Jacques’ knee, of their different opinions, one claiming that Jacques would be dead unless they made haste and amputated the leg, the other that they should remove the bullet and the piece of cloth that went in with it to save the poor devil’s leg. In the meantime, you might have seen Jacques sitting up in bed and looking at his leg pitifully, bidding it a last farewell like one of our generals being treated by Dufouart and Louis was recently seen doing.
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The third surgeon would have sat around gawping up to the point where a quarrel broke out between them and words then led to blows.

I will spare you all of these things which you can find in novels, the comedies of antiquity and in society. When I heard the host exclaim about his wife, ‘What the devil was she doing at the door?’ I was reminded of Molière’s Harpagon when he says, referring to his son: ‘What was he doing in that galley?’
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And I admit that it is not enough for a thing simply to be true, it must be amusing as well. And that is why people will always say: ‘What was he doing in that galley?’ while my peasant’s phrase, ‘What was she doing at the door?’, will never pass into proverb.

Jacques did not show the same reserve towards his master as I am showing to you. He did not omit the smallest detail even though he risked sending him to sleep for a second time. If it was not the cleverest it was at least the most sturdy of the three surgeons who remained in control of the patient.

Are you not going to take out lancets in front of our eyes, I hear you ask me, start cutting his flesh, make his blood run and show us a surgical operation? Would that be in good taste in your opinion?…

Come, let us pass over the operation. But you must at least allow Jacques to say to his master, as he did: ‘Ah, Monsieur, it’s a terrible job to put a shattered knee back together again.’

And allow his master to reply as before: ‘Come, come, Jacques, you’re joking.’

But the one thing I would not keep from you for all the gold in the world is that hardly had Jacques’ master made this impertinent reply when his horse stumbled and fell and his knee came into violent contact with a pointed stone and there he was shouting at the top of his voice: ‘I’m dying! My knee is shattered!’

Although Jacques, who was the nicest chap you could imagine, was very fond of his master, I would very much like to know what was going on at the bottom of his heart, if not in the first moment, at least when he had assured himself that his master’s fall would not have any serious consequences, and whether he was able to resist a slight feeling of secret joy at an accident that would teach his master what it was to have an injury to the knee. And, Reader, there is another thing which I would like you to tell me. That is whether his master would not have preferred to have been injured even a little more seriously any place other than the knee or in other words whether he was not more sensitive to shame than to pain?

When the master had recovered a little from his fall and his pain he got back into his saddle and spurred his horse five or six times, which made him go off like greased lightning. Jacques’ mount followed suit because there existed between the two animals the same intimacy as between their riders. They were two pairs of friends.

When the two panting horses had gone back to their normal pace Jacques said to his master: ‘Well, Monsieur, what do you think, then?’