Ah well! He would not hold it back from them any longer: “Cholera is not a disease, it’s a burst of pride.” A burst of pride worthy of the great deeps, the vast spaces of which he had just spoken; equal to the strange possibilities of these spaces and abysses; a hypertrophy of embellishment (if the term may be used); a barrel organ worthy of an unbridled chemistry; the embroidered lion that leans on the flower of your breast and suddenly assumes substance and antediluvian dimensions. Everything ending, moreover, in ineluctable chemistry. But what lovely fireworks!
“Do you know what is the best anatomical table going? It’s a map, a map of Tenderness with East Indies shown to the life. At one and the same moment it is noon in Paris, five in the morning in Ceylon, noon in Tahiti, and six in the evening at Lima. While a camel lies in its death throes in the dust of Karakorum, a shopgirl is drinking champagne in a café, a family of crocodiles is descending the Amazon, a herd of elephants is crossing the equator, a llama with a load of borate of soda is spitting in its driver’s face on a path in the Andes, a whale is floating between Cape North and the Lofoten Islands, and it’s the Feast of the Virgin in Bolivia. The terraqueous globe revolves, heavens knows why or how, in solitude and shadow.
“Another parenthesis; let’s digress for a moment; let’s look around to right and left. Have you ever closely examined a pin wheel? What is it? Quite simply cardboard, powder, strips of wood, and some wire. The cardboard will take twenty years, a hundred years, a thousand, to live its cardboard life. A sad thing, the life of cardboard! Whether it’s blue, yellow, red, or green (colors don’t bother me, I like them all) or gray, the life of cardboard isn’t worth a fig. Now Champollion found cardboard in Egypt that had been living that life for three thousand years (it’s still living it now in a glass case). The loves and joys of cardboard, the sufferings and woes of cardboard: can you imagine them? But set fire to the cardboard cartridge in the village square. What a sight! Everybody cries: ‘Ah! Ah!’
“A burst of pride. At that moment, nothing counts but the burst and the pride; everything explodes: family and fatherland. Tristan has set fire to himself, he literally bursts in his skin, and Juliet too, and Antony and Cleopatra, and the whole caboodle. Each for himself. I love you and you love me; it’s very beautiful, but who will give me reasons for persisting in these compromises, these half measures and little deaths when, from the abysses of my liver, are emerging the best reasons in the world for becoming.”
An end to joking! They had paid him the honor, he believed, of asking him about cholera; he was now ready to reply.
“Enter, let us enter into these five or six cubic feet of flesh about to become cholera-stricken, flesh prey to the symptoms of that cancer of pure reason, flesh tired of the evasions imposed upon it by its gray matter, which with the aid of its mysteries suddenly starts to reason and to work overtime.
“What happened in the beginning? Nobody can tell us. No doubt, later on, a solitary wave, fifty to sixty feet high, seven to eight hundred miles long and advancing at the rate of two knots a second, has traversed the dead flat ocean. Before and after it, April rests blossoming on the waters. No boom, no foam; there are no breakers or ripples in these vast, fathomless expanses, which nothing can surprise. Just water moving over water, and no consciousness to perceive it.
“Up till now, everything’s beginning, nothing has changed. Adolphe, Marie, or François are still at your side, loving you (or hating you). It’s a matter of three seconds.”
He wanted, he said, to give a description, “even an approximate one, if, alas, I can’t do more,” of how human consciousness finally felt when stripped of all its joys. Even the memory of them was effaced. He compared these joys to birds. The migrants first and foremost, those that delight the most diverse lands according to time and season, and especially the wonderful wild peacocks. Highflying peacocks, able to speed their fleeing arrowheads more swiftly than the grebe, the plover, the woodcock, the green duck, and the thrush.
“All this bird life, fleeing not toward the horizon but toward the zenith, fills and overflows the sky. There are so many that it is jammed with them, its high places are choked, it suffers pain.
“That is the moment when the cholera victim’s face reflects that stupor said to be characteristic. His debilitated joys are terrified today by something other than their own weakness; by some unknown thing from which they flee far beyond true north and are lost to view. Heavens, Adolphe! or Marie, or François, what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong is that he’s dying, to put it politely, dying of pride. Little he cares, from now on, for the flesh, or for the flesh of his flesh. He is following his notion.
“Sometimes, though, a hand still clings to the apron, the lapel, of a friend, of a lover. But the sedentary birds: the passerines, the sparrows, tits, nightingales (think of the nightingales! What a lot of people enjoy them, especially during nights in May), all the feeders on filth, on decay, on worms and insects to be found everywhere just by hopping about—all the sedentary joys knock off. They find out in an instant how to organize themselves into high flying wedges. Fear gives wings and wit. The day darkens. The stupor is not enough: one has to stagger, fall on the spot: at table, in the street, in love, in hate, and attend to far more intimate, personal, and passionate things.”
He considered Angelo an all but perfect specimen of the most attentive and charming cavalier. “You have succeeded in interesting me and even, I may say, in charming me, if only by your struggle with your breeches, and not everybody could do that.” As for Mademoiselle, he had always been at the mercy of those little lance-point faces. But what was the formal end of all that? The pericardium suffused with sanguinolent fluid, the cellular tissue covered with a varicose network of veins filled with liquefied black blood, the abdomen distended, the bile black, the lungs white, the bronchial tubes red and foamy—these teach their brain more in one flash than a thousand years of philosophy. Now that is precisely the condition in which we shall find the insides of Adolphe, Marie, and François, emptied of birds. Or your own, if it takes your fancy.
“If that were all, the truth would be within reach of every purse, at the mercy of a miracle; but one can’t burn just half a pin wheel, once the powder’s been lit.”
Third parenthesis: Had they ever seen a volcanic eruption? Neither had he. But it was easy to imagine the moment when, daylight having been abolished by the ashes, smoke, and poison-clouds, a new light arises from the burning crater.
“Here we have the first glimmers of that light which, little by little, will reveal the other side of things. The cholera victim is no longer able to avert his gaze from it. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph themselves wouldn’t wish to miss a scrap of it.”
Some details must be gone into. Had they any notion, even an elementary one, of human flesh? That wasn’t surprising. Most people shared their ignorance. “It’s all the more strange since everyone is continuously consuming human flesh, without even knowing what it is. Who has not seen the world change, darken or bloom, because some hand no longer touches yours, or because certain lips caress you? But they’re exactly like you, they do it on faith. Not to mention one’s own flesh, which one burns in shovelfuls, day in and day out, for a yes or a no.
“It’s so small a matter that it’s nothing.” He had only to recall how pettish they both looked out in the storm, when he caught sight of them under the ruined arch of that cellar, to be convinced that they were ready to sacrifice themselves each for the other. Come now, that leaped to the eye, and they needn’t affect irony, especially Mademoiselle. “Admit you were afraid for him. People never frankly admit those things, and it’s a pity, but it’s a matter of habitual compromise, of half-tints, half-tones, flats and sharps.” The fact remained that they were quite simply ready to sacrifice themselves for a certain quantity of salt and water; for a plumber’s job of pipes and bell-wires.
Nor would he go now into interminable considerations. This sufficed. The vanity of people and things was well known to all. Yet people c
ontinued to be surprised at the indifference shown by cholera victims to those around them and to the courage and devotion often spent upon them. “In most illnesses, the sick person takes an interest in those who are looking after him. Patients on the point of death have been seen shedding tears over their loved ones or asking for news of Aunt Eulalie. The cholera victim is not a patient: he’s an impatient. He has just understood too many essential things. He’s in a hurry to know more. That’s all that interests him, and if you both caught the cholera you’d cease to mean anything to each other. You’d have found something better.
“I regret to say this to you, in spite of the obvious signs of your deep attachment. And here we cannot avoid speaking of jealous care for the sick. The loved one is leaving you for a new passion, and one you know to be final. Even if he is still in your arms, he is shaking with shudders and spasms, groaning in an embrace from which you are shut out.
“That’s why I told you a little while ago that your little Frenchman wasn’t altogether good, or else he was too much so. I should have added that in any case he lacked elegance. He wasn’t facing reality. He was clinging on. To everybody. What for? To end by following their example.
“But this, as always, is a matter of temperament. Let’s return to our pipes, bell-wires, and other gewgaws.”
If all this had no feeling, it would be heaven. There’d be no curiosity, hence no pride; we should be truly eternal. “But lo and behold, vast balls of fire slop heavily out of the crater, incandescent clouds take the place of the sky. Your cholera victim is prodigiously interested. His one aim from now on is to know more.
“What is it he’s feeling? Banal things: his feet are cold. His hands icy. He’s cold in what are called the extremities. His blood is receding, rushing to the site of the spectacle. It doesn’t want to miss anything.
“Well, it’s nothing much. Generally, there’s nothing to be done. Poultices for wooden legs—as you can imagine, there’s an infinite variety of them. Calomel is one. No, I haven’t got any. What should I do with it? Sirup of gum perfumed with orange blossom is another. We have a choice between leeches at the anus and bloodletting—one doesn’t need much erudition to think of these in such cases. We can pass from clysters to cachou, from ratany to quinine, mint, camomile, lime, balm. In Poland they give a grain of belladonna; in London two grains of subnitrate of bismuth. Some try cupping the epigastrium, or mustard plasters on the abdomen. Some administer (it’s a pretty word) hydrochlorate of soda or acetate of lead.
“The best remedy would be to make oneself preferred. But, as you can see, one has nothing to offer in exchange, to replace this new passion. That’s to say, we keep on looking for a specific capable of neutralizing the toxic attack, according to the formula of learned persons, when what is wanted is to make oneself preferred, offer more than is given by that burst of pride: in a word, to be stronger, or more handsome, or more seductive, than death.”
He would tell them something in confidence—or rather, no, the confidence should stop there. He wouldn’t say a word more on this subject. “Prayers, appealing looks, and all your charm are no help. If you knew me better, you’d know that when I’ve decided to be silent I never yield to the temptation to talk.”
On the other hand, they had wanted a description of the cholera. He had agreed; they should have it. “And no stopping up your ears, if you please. Just now this young man seemed disposed to eat me alive if I didn’t humor his desires. He shoved his pretty lady under my nose; he shoved you under my nose with the excuse that you must be saved at all costs. Why must you? That’s a question he doesn’t even ask himself. Above all, why should I and the rest of the world share his opinion? And, I repeat, save what?”
He wasn’t in the least scared by loftiness: “Sit down and take some more rum, it’s more sensible.” He was an old gentleman. He had shot his bolt long ago. “Saber, pistol, the duel you considerately offer me with such amusing ardor—what good would they do? Was it I who made the world?
“If I inflict my confidences on you, it’s precisely because I think I’m in the presence of reasonable persons, having regard to their pleasant faces and notwithstanding that awkward age which so easily drives one to extremes. Be thankful for youth, which permits one to approach death without mistrust or terror.
“The cholera victim no longer has any face: he has a facies—a facies that could only mean cholera. The eye, sunk deep in its socket and seemingly atrophied, is surrounded by a livid circle and half covered by the upper eyelid. It expresses either great agitation of the soul or a sort of annihilation. The sclerosis, now visible, is smitten with ecchymosis; the pupil is dilated and will never contract again. These eyes will never have tears again. The lashes, the lids are impregnated with a dry, grayish matter. Eyes that remain wide open in a rain of ashes, gazing at halos, giant fireflies, flashes of lightning.
“The cheeks have lost their flesh, the mouth is half open, the lips glued to the teeth. The breath passing through the narrow dental arcades becomes loud. It’s like a child imitating an enormous kettle. The tongue is swollen, flabby, rather red, covered with a yellowish coating.
“The chill, first felt in the feet, knees, and hands, tends to invade the whole body. Nose, cheeks, ears are frozen. The breath is cold, the pulse slow, extremely weak, toward the decline of physiological existence.
“Now in this condition the victim answers with lucidity if questioned. His voice is hoarse but he doesn’t wander. He sees clearly, and from both sides. When he chooses, it is with full awareness.”
He pointed out that all this takes longer to describe than to happen. “It is all seen in a flash as one cries out, rushes forward, takes Jacques, Pierre, or Paul in one’s arms and asks: ‘What’s to be done? He’s lost!’”
So he felt; but, as he had remarked at the beginning, he had never been present at any volcanic eruptions. Nevertheless, he could imagine them quite well; and there must be in the spectacle of these convulsions a deeply tragic moment, doubtless of hypnotic value—the moment when the festival of fire sprang from the entrails of the earth and flung itself roaring upon life. Without having read anything on the subject except the Ætna and the stories of the Cyclops, it was easy to imagine those gigantic brayings, those brutalities incandescent, cindery, mephitic, and probably containing electricity. One had to be struck with such surprise, facing so clear a demonstration of our nothingness, that all the salt and probably all the sugar of Monsieur Claude Bernard turned into a statue.
“Some of my colleagues, who aren’t all blind, have spoken of ‘choleric asphyxia.’ I even thought for a moment that they were capable of understanding and expressing a little more than science whispers into their ears, when they added this charming remark—and how true!—‘The air still reaches the blood, but the blood doesn’t reach the air.’ I should have liked, after that (I repeat) most intelligent observation, to hear them pronounce the name of Cassandra; immediately after, and to show that they had really understood.
“I have spoken of proselytism; I mean that people cannot resist the need to proclaim the future, that is to say the truth, the truth in the egg.
“I’ve often thought that there is perhaps a moment when the cholera victim suffers, suffers horribly, not in his pride as hitherto (that’s what is pushing him on) but, at last, in his love, and this might hold him back on our side.
“Here I open another parenthesis. Soon to be closed, don’t worry, but necessary. It should be noted that the cholera, as you know, strikes everyone without distinction, and without warning. People take the decision to have cholera suddenly, in the midst of other fixed and firm decisions engendered by all the force of habit. And those most above suspicion are forthwith susceptible: the mother just as much as the girl in love, the housewife, the bourgeois, the soldier, the house-painter and the painter of battle scenes. Mediocrity does not exclude it; happiness (as is right) provokes it. Let’s now close the parenthesis and keep its contents well in our minds. We are really much more than we
think.
“It is maintained, then, that the cholera victim suffers horribly. It is said that nothing can compare with the torture of these living corpses who appreciate all the horror of their position. This obviously happens, as you will understand, in a state without dimensions or duration; let us place this horror: when they are among the cones of fire, the waves of sparks, the octopus lava, the fans of light. Their bodies are deaf, blind, dumb, insensible. That is to say, they no longer have hands, feet, back, nails, hair, or hide. And yet they are lucid. They continue to hear and see those around them, the noises in the street, the pot simmering on the fire, the flapping of the washing on the line, the groans, the red of a dress, the black of a mustache, the buzzing of the flies.
“If there is suffering, now is the moment. I say ‘if’; for what proof have we of this suffering? The spasms? The convulsions? The hiccups? The cries? The grinding of the teeth? Are we so sure we know the true outward manifestations of joy?
“But—a flash of pain, real horrible pain, that I believe in; and if it is possible, this is the moment for it. I say ‘if’ because I am trying, like everyone else, to be objective, not to take a short cut, leave anything to chance. It comes at the moment when, under the rain of ashes, the victim wonders if all this is worth while, if it wasn’t better to be eating one’s stew and not thinking of Charlemagne.
“The invalid is in an extreme state of agitation. He tries to rid himself of every covering, complains of unbearable heat, feels thirsty; forgetting all modesty, he flings himself out of bed or furiously uncovers his sexual parts. And yet his skin has turned cold and soaked with an icy sweat, which soon becomes sticky and gives to anyone touching it the disagreeable impression of contact with a cold-blooded animal.