“You will aid me, Madame?”
“In so far as I am able to. A word of advice: beware of speaking of this to the Princess: intimately connected with your wife, privy to her passion—it is notorious—I believe she connives at what is going on under her roof.”
“Not a word to her then. Tomorrow morning I shall be hidden in the dressing room adjoining the bedchamber.”
Lest we be overseen in conversation together we separate at once, I having recommended to the Duke that he avoid me the whole of that day. I seek out the Duchess and, encouraging her to banish all scruples in order to enjoy to the full the pleasures at whose mere thought the young man has already made her giddy, I notify her that the Duke means to go ahunting the next day, which will enable her to pass the entire morning in riot with Dolni.
“Get started early, the two of you, and when you are well under way I’ll arrive and we shall carry on as a trio.”
My proposal fetched gay laughter from the Duchess, and she assented to it gladly. The moment drew nigh; thinking the two lovers properly at grips, I bade the Duke follow me on to the stage.
“So then, good sir,” said I, directing his attention to the frantically copulating couple, “is this less than you require to be convinced?”
Furious Grillo, drawn dagger in hand, hurls himself upon the adulterous pair. Aiding his arm, I see to it the blow falls upon his faithless spouse: the blade sinks deep into her flank, the Duke would now vent his rage upon the lover, but nimble Dolni rolls away, springs to his feet, scampers from the room, Grillo hot in his pursuit. They race down a long corridor … at its farther end two trap doors open, one dropping the young man into an underground passage, where he is safe, the other tumbling Grillo into the works of a frightful machine fitted with a thousand sharp blades for carving to ribbons whatever is placed inside it.
“Great God, what is this? what have I done?” cries the Duke, “oh, hideous snare! Diabolical knaves, all your design was to trick me! And you, dearest wife, I was mistaken, they deceived me—you were seduced, at bottom you are innocent—”
These last words were scarce out of the Duke’s mouth when Borghese sent his naked and bleeding wife flying to join him in the pit.
Over the open trap we lowered a grillwork, upon it we three, Dolni, Olympia, and I, lay down flat and peered at our captives. “There she is, my Lord,” said I, “innocent no doubt and yet more certainly wounded by your treatment of her. Succor her if you dare, but know that in doing so your peril is great.”
Grillo starts impulsively toward his wife; but his movement releases a spring, the machine starts to whirr, its many blades to turn, their edges slash at the two victims who in less than ten minutes are threshed shapeless, of them nought but blood and splintered bone remains. I need not describe our ecstasy, Borghese’s and mine, as we watched that scene; both frigged by Dolni, we loosed discharge after discharge, at least a dozen in all, the sight of that atrocity left our cunts in a state nearly as gruesome, and inspired our minds to a very rare degree.
“Come spend the day with me tomorrow,” Olympia suggested when we had returned to the city, “I shall introduce you to the personage who has offered me a hundred thousand crowns to burn down all the hospitals and alms-houses in Rome. The man who is to attend to the lighting of the fires will be there too.”
“What, do you still have that horror on your mind, Princess?”
“Certainly, Juliette. You confine your criminal activity to upsetting households whereas I make mine felt by at least half a city. Incendiary Nero is my model; I too would like to stand on my balcony, a lyre in my hand, and while singing gaze forth upon my native land become a pyre for my countrymen.”
“Olympia, you are a monster.”
“Oh, not so great a one as you; the base scheme that brought the Grillos to their end was absolutely typical of your invention, I’d never have dreamt up the like.”
At Borghese Palace the next day Olympia presented her guests to me. “The first of these gentlemen”—it was to the elder she alluded—“is Monsignor Chigi, related to that line of princes several of whom have occupied the Holy See; he is today at the head of the Roman police; the proposed fire I mentioned to you yesterday will benefit him, and the hundred thousand crowns fee he is to pay me is part of his investment in a very profitable venture. And here is Count Bracciani who, as Europe’s foremost physician, is to conduct the operation. Juliette,” Olympia added in a lowered tone, “both are friends of mine; I implore you to take their eventual requests of you into kindly consideration.”
“You shall not be embarrassed by my behavior,” I assured her.
And the Princess having given the strictest orders that we be left undisturbed, conversation was engaged.
“I am having you dine,” said Olympia, “with one of the most famous scoundrels to come out of France in generations; she has been giving us Romans daily examples of very high proficiency in crime; her presence need not hinder you, my friends, in the forthcoming discussions of the one we are preparing.”
“Truly, Madame,” said the master of the police, “you here qualify as crime an altogether unpretentious and certainly very comprehensible act. I consider charitable institutions the most baneful things a large city can contain; they drain the people’s energy, they soften its fiber, they promote sloth; they are in every sense pernicious; the needy individual is to the State as the parasite branch is to the peach tree: it causes it to wither, drinks its sap, and bears no fruit. What does the horticulturist do when he espies that branch? He cuts it off, and without qualms. The statesman must proceed likewise: one of the basic laws of Nature is that nothing superfluous subsist in the world. You may be sure of it, not only does the shiftless beggar, always a nuisance, consume part of what the industrious man produces, which is already a serious matter, but will quickly become dangerous the moment you suspend your dole to him. My desire is that instead of bestowing a groat upon these misfortunates we concentrate our efforts upon wiping them out; my desire is that they be totally eliminated, extirpated; exterminated; killed, that is to say, and why make any bones about it? killed as one kills a breed of noxious animals. That is the first reason that led me to offer Princess Borghese one hundred thousand gold crowns for destroying these houses that are a blight upon our city. The second is that upon their sites I mean to build hospices for travelers, pilgrims, and the like; some buildings razed, others constructed in their place, don’t you see, and the revenues which went formerly to pay for maintaining the hospitals I now ask to have paid to me; and paid to me they shall be; mine as well shall be an annual one hundred thousand crowns rental: thus I sacrifice only the first year of an assured income to Madame Borghese, who in Count Bracciani, she tells me, has the suitable man for delivering Rome of these houses and for making a need felt for those I am ready to put up on their foundations, and for which I shall have no trouble obtaining the funds originally set aside for the hospitals.18 There are twenty-eight of these asylums in the city,” Chigi continued, “as well as nine conservatorios containing roughly eighteen hundred poor girls whom, needless to say, I include in my proscriptions. All that must be set simultaneously ablaze; there will be some thirty or forty thousand good-for-nothings sacrificed—firstly, to the welfare of the State; secondly, to the pleasures of Olympia, who is going to reap a pretty penny from this affair; thirdly, to my fortune, for with what I already possess, I become one of Rome’s richest ecclesiastics if the plan goes successfully through.”
“It would appear,” said Bracciani, “that I, who am to execute it, come off the most poorly; for it seems not yet to have occurred to you to offer me a sequin out of the great profits you are due to make.”
“Chigi supposed that I would give you some of my hundred thousand,” Olympia said to the Count, “he was mistaken: the sum is modest, once divided it amounts to twice nothing at all, and I feel you should demand a hundred thousand for yourself; you are worth that much to Monsignor, what more capable practitioner could he hope to find??
??
“Softly,” said the churchman, “let’s have no falling out at the start of an undertaking so important, it would be the way to have it all end very dismally and to provoke difficulties for one another. I grant the Count the same emoluments Madame Borghese is to have, I grant a further hundred thousand francs gratuity to this charming woman,” Chigi went on, smiling in my direction; “Olympia’s friend must have a similar character and by that title alone deserves to be treated as an accomplice.”
“She has all the virtues you can expect in one,” said the Princess, “and I guarantee she will not disappoint you. The question of remunerations may be considered settled; in behalf of my friends I accept your offers; let us now bend our thoughts to success.”
“I shall obtain it,” said Bracciani, “and it shall be entire: there shall not escape a single one of the victims Chigi’s profound statecraft, or rather his voluptuous wickedness, dooms to die.”
“Upon what henceforth shall Roman doctors be able to experiment, I wonder?”
“As Juliette implies, it is very certain,” Olympia observed, “that almost all of them have long been in the habit of trying out their remedies upon these poorer patients whose disappearance will pose a problem to the profession. I am reminded,” she added, “of what young Iberti, my personal doctor, said to me only the other day upon arriving at my bedside fresh from one of those experiments. ‘What concern to the State is the existence of the vile beings that ordinarily crowd those dens?’ he said in response to the look of disapproval I assumed in order to find out how he would justify himself; ‘you would be doing society an enormous disservice by not permitting us medical artists to test our talents upon society’s dishonoring dregs. These have their use; Nature, in making them weak and defenseless, indicates what it is to be, and to refrain from so using them is to flout Nature’s instructions.’ ‘But,’ said I, departing a little from the central issue, ‘when, in a different case, some sordid interest leads a man distinguished by wealth or by position to seize the favorable opportunity afforded by a person’s illness to commit a crime against that person, and when this man invites a doctor to hasten the patient’s last moments, is it a grave fault for the doctor to accept the proposition?’
“‘Great heavens, no,’ my young Aesculapius replied, ‘provided he is well paid he has no real choice but to accept. Doing the deed, he has nothing to fear from his accomplice, neither does his accomplice have anything to fear from him: both have everything to gain from guarding their secret. Refusing to do the deed would get the doctor nowhere, for he could hardly boast of having declined a proposition which is not of the kind that is made to an honest man: from a refusal he would thus extract nothing but solitary and intellectual pleasure much inferior to that which the offered sum would procure him. And even were he to proclaim that to such a proposition he had said no, he’d not be praised for it; but only told he had done his duty. And as for those who do it there is never any reward, needless to go to the bother of chasing empty applause. Comparing what, apart from that applause, he is to gain from acceptance or refusal, he discovers that in electing the latter alternative he may either say nothing of the proposition and all alone reap the meager enjoyments that having a good opinion of oneself provides to fools, or create a stir and thereby doom his accomplice—and what does he gain from dooming the accomplice rather than the patient?—in order to obtain the tawdry and barren satisfaction of having it said he has done his duty. Weigh it up: a futile pleasure as against the sum offered him to shorten the patient’s life: what responsible man could conceivably hesitate an instant? To the sane physician only one course is open: bargain for a high price, then kill and keep his mouth shut.’
“Those were the words, those the views of Iberti, the prettiest, the wittiest, the most engaging doctor in Rome19 and you will readily understand how little difficulty he had convincing me. But to return to the business before us,” Olympia continued; “are you sure of the operation, Bracciani? Is there not the danger that the perfidious efforts of rescuers might ruin the effects we are striving for? Humane impulses, as much to be dreaded as loathed, and capable of spoiling many a fair crime—dare we suppose that they will not move a certain number of people to rush to the aid of our victims?”
“I expect this,” said the Count. “I take up my position atop a high hill in the middle of Rome. From there I launch invisible bombs, thirty-seven of them, one for each of the thirty-seven asylums; they land in barrage. Other projectiles follow at carefully spaced intervals: rescuers flock to a new burning area after having mastered the flames in a former one, which I set promptly back on fire.”
“In this way, Count, you could have an entire city ablaze.”
“Exactly,” said the physician, “and our present undertaking, limited in scope though it be, may very well cause half the population of Rome to perish.”
“Some of the hospitals are located in extremely poor quarters of the city,” said Chigi, “those quarters shall be destroyed infallibly.”
“Such considerations do not make you pause?” Olympia wondered.
“Not for one instant, Madame,” Chigi and the Count replied as one man.
“These gentlemen seem to have firmly made up their minds,” I observed to the Princess, “and my guess would be that the crime they are about to commit is to them something of slight importance.”
“There is nothing of crime in our project,” Chigi explained. “All our errors under the chapter of ethics come from the absurdity of our ideas touching good and evil.
“If we fully apprehended the indifference of all our actions, were we properly persuaded that those we call just are anything but that in the eyes of Nature, and that those we characterize as iniquitous are perhaps, in her view, the most perfect measure of reason and equity, for a certainty we would make far fewer miscalculations. But childhood prejudices lead us astray and will never cease inducing us into error so long as we have the weakness to listen to them. It does indeed seem that the lamp of reason does not begin to enlighten us until such time as we are no longer able to profit from its rays, and not before stupidity has been added to stupidity that we arrive at the discovery of the source of all that ignorance has caused us to commit. We almost always employ the laws of our government as our compass for determining right and wrong, just and injust. The law, we say, prohibits doing this or that, this or that is hence unjust; than this manner of judging none is more deceiving, for the law is oriented toward the general interest; now, nothing is at a farther remove from the general interest than individual interest, its very opposite; hence, nothing less just than the law which sacrifices all individual interests to the general interest. But, they maintain, man wishes to live in society; he must therefore forego a portion of his private good for the sake of public good. Very well; but how ever could he have made such a pact without being sure of receiving at least as much as he gives? Now, he extracts nothing from the pact he makes when consenting to the law; for you put him far more heavily to contribution than you satisfy him, and for every occasion upon which the law protects him there are a thousand others when it restricts him; he hence ought not to have consented to the law, or ought to have insisted that it be made infinitely more lenient. Laws have served only to delay the annihilation of prejudices, to lengthen our term of shameful bondage to error; law is a bridle man imposed upon man when he saw with what ease man freed himself of other bridles, hence a makeshift—to answer what purpose? There are punishments for the guilty, true enough; in them I see cruelties but not a means to make men better, and that it seems to me is the end to which one should have labored. Punishments, aye—and there’s nothing easier to escape, this certitude encourages the emancipated and venturesome spirit. Ah, let it be understood once and for all, laws are nothing but futile and dangerous; their sole effect is to multiply crimes or to cause them to be committed in safety by compelling the criminal to act in secrecy. But for laws and religion there is no imagining the degree of grandeur and glory human knowled
ge would have attained today; no imagining how these infamous curbs have retarded progress; that is our single debt to them. Priests dare inveigh against the passions; lawyers dare fetter them with laws. But merely compare the ones and the others; see which, passions or laws, have done mankind the more good. Who doubts, as Helvétius proclaims, that the passions are in morals precisely what motion is in physics? ’Tis to strong passions alone invention and artistic wonders are due; the passions should be regarded, the same author goes on to say, as the fertilizing germ of the mind and the puissant spring to great deeds. Those individuals who are not motivated by strong passions are mediocre beings. Only great passions will ever be able to produce great men; when passion falters decrepitude enters in, when it is absent stupidity prevails. These fundamentals established, I ask how laws that inhibit the passions can be anything but profoundly and in every sense dangerous. In the history of any country compare the periods of anarchy with those during which order was most vigorously maintained by the most vigorously enforced laws, and recognize that only at moments when the laws were held in contempt do stupendous actions occur. Law resumes its despotic sway and a fatal lethargy is seen to invade the spirits of men; though vice ceases to be noticeable, the disappearance of all virtue is yet more conspicuous: the inner workings rust and revolutions begin to breed.”
“But,” Olympia interrupted, “you wish to do away with all laws in an empire?”
“No. Restored to a state of Nature, mankind, I affirm, would be happier than it can possibly be under the absurd yoke of law. I am opposed to man’s renunciation of a single ounce of his capacities. He has no need of laws for his self-protection; in him Nature put the necessary instincts and energy for that; taking the law into his own hands he will always obtain a speedier, purer, more incisive, stronger-brewed justice than anything to be had in a courtroom, for his act of personal justice will be determined by his personal interest and the hurt he has personally sustained, whereas the laws of a people are never other than the mass and the result of the interests of all the lawmakers who cooperate in erecting those laws.”