Walking into Cardinal Albani’s summer residence, great was my surprise to find Princess Borghese present there. By a window she and Bernis stood engaged in conversation; they broke it off upon seeing me enter, and came up to me.
“What a heavenly creature,” Olympia declared. “Cardinal,” she went on, addressing the aged Albani who had been staring fixedly at me ever since I descended from my carriage, “are you not of the opinion that we have no more beautiful woman in Rome?”
Both prelates affirmed that they believed this to be the case.
And we quit the drawing room.
The Italians customarily place their living quarters in the uppermost stories of their houses; at this distance above the ground, they rightly suppose, the air is necessarily purer, less heavy, and in better circulation. Those upper apartments of the Villa Albani were beyond words elegant; gauze curtains admitted the breeze while keeping out insects which might trouble the voluptuous projects for which it was very plain to me, as I glanced about, that the stage had been elaborately set.
The moment we were installed, Olympia approached me and spoke in this strain. “Juliette, you were recommended to these two cardinals in attestations from the Duke of Tuscany similar to the letter you brought me from that prince, my ecclesiastical friends have been exceedingly eager to become acquainted with you … with your person, with your behavior, with your attitudes of mind. My relations with these gentlemen being of the closest and most cordial sort, and knowing them quite as thoroughly and in the same way we, you and I, know each other, I have felt under no obligation to hide any of the truth from their curiosity: gratifying it, my accounts have, I believe, prepared a warm welcome for you. They desire you; I entreat you to accept their advances: these two dignitaries enjoy enormous favor with the Pope. ’Tis through their mediation preferments, advancements, graces of every variety are to be had; nay, nothing can be obtained in Rome save through them. However easy your circumstances, seven or eight thousand sequins now and then can do you no harm: one may often enough command the means to pay the butcher and the baker, but never has one too much to spend upon one’s frivolities, and especially when they are of the order of those we are addicted to. I offer you my own example, many a time have I received money from them, I still do. Ah, women are made to be fucked, made also to be supported, and just as we should never turn up our noses at gifts, neither should we shun occasions for entitling ourselves to rewards. Bernis and his colleague, moreover, have in common a peculiar eccentricity, that of enjoying no pleasure unless it is paid for; I am certain you will appreciate this singularity. As well, I urge you to manifest the extremest indulgence toward them, nothing short of that is required with such libertines; only by dint of great art and complicated ministrations may their desires be reanimated; reserve would be misplaced here, make free, unrestrictedly, with everything; I shall show you how it is done; they must be relieved of their fuck, cost what it may, we can neglect nothing to achieve that end. All your wits and parts may therefore be put heavily to contribution; I felt you should be forewarned.”
This speech would have surprised me less had I been more familiar with Roman manners. At any rate, if I was a little startled, I was by no means affrighted, not after the thousand and one trials I had faced intrepidly and come victoriously through in the past. Bernis, seeing that the Princess was done speaking her prologue, came forth now and addressed me in his turn.
“We know that you are charming,” said he, “intelligent and untainted by prejudices: Leopold’s written testimonial is very complete, it is upheld by the report we have had from Olympia, who was not reticent either. Upon the basis of this information we allow ourselves to presume, Albani and I, that you’ll not play the prude with us, and to demonstrate your good will we would have you show yourself as much a rascal as in actual fact you are, because a woman is only truly amiable, I believe one may say, to the extent she is a whore. And so you will surely concur in our view that she must be foolish indeed if when Nature gives her a taste for pleasures, she does not seek as many admirers for her charms as she may contrive to encounter men on earth.”
“Gifted singer of the Vaucluse,” I replied, indicating to him that I was acquainted with his charming poetry, “you who penned your attack upon libertinage with such energy and ingenuity that the reader of your lines comes away worshiping what you condemn,7 one would need many more virtues than I can claim in order to resist a man of your breed.”
And squeezing his hand affectionately, “Ah, believe me,” I told him, “I am yours for life, and be equally certain that you will always find in me a student worthy of the great teacher who so generously deigns to undertake her.”
The conversation became general and was soon enlivened by philosophy. Albani showed us a letter from Bologna, in which he was advised of the death of one of his intimates who, though occupying a position of foremost importance in the Church, having always lived in libertinage, had held out against conversion, even on his deathbed.
“You knew the fellow,” said he to Bernis, “preaching had no effect upon him whatever: keeping his head and his wits up until the very end, he breathed his last while in the arms of that niece he adored, declaring to her that the one thing he regretted in the necessity of denying the existence of heaven was that it barred him from the hope of being someday reunited to her.”
“It seems to me,” said Cardinal de Bernis, “that these deaths are beginning to become rather frequent: the author of Alzire and D’Alembert have made them fashionable.”
“Assuredly,” Albani went on, “it is a sign of grave weakness to change one’s mind as one dies. Have we not time enough to come to a few conclusions during the course of a long life? Our vigorous and lucid years should be employed choosing this or that belief, according to it should we live out our span and in it finally die. Still to be perplexed, to be in the grips of uncertainty as we enter our decline is to be heading for a frightful death. You will perhaps maintain that, deranging the organism, the ultimate crisis also unsteadies one’s doctrines. Yes, if these doctrines be either newly or timidly embraced, never when they are early adopted and determinedly adhered to, when they are the fruit of labor, of study, of deep meditation, because as such they form a habit and we carry our habits with us to the grave.”
“Precisely,” said I, glad to have the opportunity of making my way of thinking known to the celebrated libertines in whose company I was, “and if the happy stoicism, which is my creed as it is yours, deprives us of some pleasures, it spares us a good many pains in life and instructs us in how suitably to die. I know not whether it is because I am but twenty-five,” I continued, “and therefore prone to behold as far off the moment when I shall be restored to the dust whereof I was made, or whether I derive my comfort and courage from my principles, but it is without the least terror that I contemplate the inevitable disjunction of the molecules now grouped into my existence. Quite convinced that I shall be no worse off after my life than I was before being born, I expect I shall surrender my body to the earth just as calmly, just as impassively as when out of the earth I received it.”
“And what lies at the source of this tranquillity? The profound contempt you have always had for religious nonsense,” Bernis declared; “had you relapsed but once, that would probably have sufficed to undo you forever. Whence the rule: one cannot become an unbeliever too early.”
“But is that so easy as one may think?” Olympia wondered.
“It is far less difficult than some suppose,” Albani replied; “but you must cut the tree at the root. If you confine yourself to lopping off branches, fresh shoots will always reappear. ’Tis during youth you must undertake the energetic eradication of prejudices inculcated in childhood. And the most deeply entrenched of them all is that which must be the most fiercely combated, I allude to that futile and chimerical god, and to curing yourself definitively of belief in his existence.”
“No, Albani, I do not feel that this operation need be numbered among those de
manding any outstanding effort from a young individual provided he be normally constituted, for the deific fallacy cannot subsist fifteen minutes in a sane mind. I ask you, indeed, who is it fails to see that a god, this bundle of contradictions, of quirks and oddities, of incompatible attributes, while he may heat the imagination, must appear ludicrous to the intellect? Those who scoff at the idea of a god may be reduced to silence, so it is thought, by telling them that from the very beginning of history and everywhere all men have acknowledged some sort of divinity; that none of the world’s countless peoples is without its belief in an invisible and mighty being which it worships and venerates; that, finally, no nation, even the most primitive, does not entertain the certitude of the existence of some power superior to human nature. Firstly, I deny that fact; but even were it so, can general conviction transform error into truth? There was a time when all men believed the sun revolved about the earth, while the latter remained stationary: did this unanimity of belief transform the false notion into a reality? There was a time when nobody was willing to believe the world was round, those who had the temerity to maintain it were persecuted. How wide has been belief in witches, in ghosts, in goblins, in apparitions; has the extent of these opinions made realities of those illusions? Of course not; but even the most reasonable and sensible people somehow feel obliged to believe in a universal spirit, without noticing, without bothering to realize, that all the evidence refutes the excellent qualities ascribed to this god. Here is a kindly father; large is his family, and from first to last all its members, I discover, are unhappy. In the kingdom of this so very wise and so very just sovereign I see crime at the pinnacle and virtue in irons. You cite the blessings that accrue to him who subscribes to this system; among them I perceive a host of ills of all sorts which you stubbornly shut your eyes to. Forced to admit that your so exceedingly good god, in perpetual self-contradiction, with the same hand distributes good and evil, to justify this you are driven to refer me to the fabulous regions of an afterlife. Better, I retort, better to invent yourself some other god than the god of theology; for yours is as confused as he is preposterous, as absurd as he is derisory. A good god who does evil or tolerates that it be done, a god of sublime equity under whose aegis innocence is always oppressed, a perfect god who produces imperfect works only: ah! agree that the existence of such a god is more pernicious than useful to mankind, and that the best for all concerned would be to annihilate him forever.”
“Charlatan,” I cried, “you disparage the drugs you trade in: what would become of your power and that of your Sacred College if everybody was as philosophical as you?”
“I am only too well aware,” said Bernis, “that error is necessary to us; men must be imposed upon, to that end we are obliged to deceive them. But from this it does not follow that we ought to deceive ourselves. Before what eyes are we to unmask the idol if not before those of our friends or of philosophers who think like us?”
“In that case,” said Olympia, “I should be most grateful if you would enlighten my ideas upon a point of morality essential to my peace of mind. They have droned their doctrine in my ears a thousand times, their definition has never satisfied me: it is of human freedom I am speaking; Bernis, what are your views upon this question? ’Tis your sage commentary I desire.”
“I shall deliver it,” said the illustrious lover of the Marquise de Pompadour, “but I request your whole attention, the matter is a rather abstract one for a woman.
“The faculty of comparing different manners of acting and of deciding which appears best to us, this is what is called freedom. Now, does man have or does he not have this faculty of decision? I am prepared to state that he does not and could not possibly have it. All our ideas owe their origin to physical and material causes which operate upon us independently of our will, because these causes result from our intimate organization and from the impact external objects have upon us; motives are in turn the results of these causes, and as a consequence our will is not free. Prey to conflicting motives, we waver, but in the moment when the decision is taken it is not we who determine it; it is enjoined upon us, it is necessitated by the various dispositions of our organs; they always dictate the direction, we always follow their guidance, the choice between this or that alternative is never exercised by us: constantly impelled by necessity, the constant slaves of necessity, that very instant when we believe we gave the clearest demonstration of our freedom is the very one in which we were subject to the most invincible constraint. Irresolution, uncertainty allow us to believe we are free, but this fancied freedom is nothing but the moment when the scales, evenly weighted, hover in equilibrium. The decision is arrived at once one of the two sides tips, and it is not we who intrude our weight to upset the balance, it is the physical objects outside us which act upon us, which reveal us at the mercy of our surroundings, the toy of natural influences, as is the case with animals, with plants. Everything resides in the action of the neural fluid and the difference between a scoundrel and an honest man consists in nought but the greater or lesser activity of the animal spirits that compose this fluid.
“‘I feel,’ says Fénelon, ‘that I am free, that I am under the absolute guidance of my own counsels.’ This gratuitous assertion cannot be proven. What assurance has the Archbishop of Cambrai that when he decides to embrace the pleasant doctrine of Madame Guyon he is free to elect the opposite course? At the very most he could prove to me that he hesitated, but, having acted as he did, I defy him to convince me he was free to act otherwise. ‘I modify myself with God’ the same author continues, ‘I am the real cause of my own willing.’ But, in saying this, Fénelon did not pause to realize that he was rendering his omnipotent god the real cause of all crimes; neither did he pause to realize that nothing so surely makes an end to the omnipotence of god as the freedom of man, for this omnipotence you imagine god to possess, and which for the sake of the discussion I temporarily grant you, is truly omnipotence only because god ordained everything from the very beginning, and it follows from this immutable and definitive ordination that man must be nothing but a passive onlooker, powerless to affect an unalterable fait accompli and therefore unfree. If he were free, he could, whenever he so willed, alter and thus destroy this original order, and in so doing show himself a match for god. Here is a problem to which such a partisan of the divinity as Fénelon ought to have devoted maturer reflection.
“Newton skipped gingerly around this formidable difficulty, he dared neither explore it nor even venture too close to it; Fénelon, more forthright although far less learned, adds: ‘When I will something, it is in my power not to will it; when I will it not, it is in my power to will it.’
“No. If, Sir, you did not do it when you willed it, that is because it was not in your power to do it and all the physical causes which inflect the scales had tipped them, this time, to the side of not doing the thing in question, and the choice was made before you arrived at a decision. Therefore, Sir, you were not free, and you never are. When you slip into that one of the two alternatives you adopt, it is because you could not possibly have adopted the other. It is your uncertainty that blinded you, you supposed it was in your power to choose because you felt it in your power to hesitate. But this uncertainty, the physical effect of two foreign objects which present themselves simultaneously, and the freedom to choose between these two objects, here are two very different matters.”
“That is enough to convince me,” Olympia rejoiced; “the idea of having been able not to commit the crimes I indulged in used sometimes to harry my conscience. My unfreedom proven, I am at peace with myself and shall continue without misgivings.”
“I urge you to do so,” said Albani; “remorse of any kind is utterly futile. Always coming after the fact, it never prevents it, and the passions invariably outshout all scruples when the moment for repeating the evil arrives.”
“Very well then, let us now turn to perpetrating some of this delicious evil in order to keep the habit bright and in order to dull
our regrets over the evil we have done in the past,” said Olympia.
“By all means,” replied Cardinal de Bernis, “but this projected evil, in order that it delight us the more, let us perpetrate it thoughtfully and on a broad scale. Lovely Juliette,” pursued the ambassador of France, “we understand that you have two pretty girls in your house, who must certainly be as complaisant as you; their beauty has been much bruited about in Rome; we feel, my colleague and I, that they should participate in this evening’s libidinous revels and invite you to send for them.”
Owing to the terms I was on with Olympia, whose glances pressed me to accept this proposition, I decided I could not very well refuse it and promptly sent a servant to fetch Elise and Raimonde; the conversation now took a different turn.
“Juliette,” Bernis said to me, “from the eagerness we have just manifested to become acquainted with the two notoriously attractive creatures you possess, do not rush to the mistaken conclusion that my confrere and I are especially partial to a sex whose femininity we excuse solely upon the condition it behave in manly fashion with us. It is indeed essential we declare to you upon this subject that it were better we refrain from devising any scheme for amusement rather than have it come to nought as a result of your failure, or your companions’, to favor us by an absolute resignation to the fantasies this statement implies.”
“Truth to tell,” Olympia put in, “these explanatory remarks are superfluous with Juliette, from the feats I have seen her perform in this genre I may give you every assurance that she will not disappoint you; and I have no doubt that her two familiars must, if only from the fact they are her protégées, be quite as philosophical as she.”