SIXTH BOOK
1
You whose enviable composure can do no more than embellish your appearance, do not think it is still a matter of uttering, in strophes of fourteen or fifteen lines, like a third-form schoolboy, exclamations which will be considered untimely, the resounding clucks of cochin-china fowl, as grotesque as one could possibly imagine, if one took the trouble. But it is more advisable to prove by facts the propositions I am putting to you. Would you then assert that because I have insulted man, the Creator, and myself in my explicable hyperboles, and with such whimsicality, that my mission is accomplished? No; the the most important part of my work is nonetheless before me, a task remaining to be done. Henceforward the strings of the novel will move the three characters mentioned above; they will thus be endowed with a less abstract power. Vitality will surge into the stream of their circulatory system and you will see how startled you will be when you encounter, where at first you had only expected to see entities belonging to the realm of pure speculation, on the one hand the corporeal organism with its ramifications of nerves an mucous membranes and, on the other, the spiritual principle which governs the physiological functions of the flesh. It is beings powerfully endowed with life who, their arms folded and holding their breath, will stand prosaically (but I am sure the effect will be very poetic) before your eyes, only a few paces away from you, so that the sun's rays, falling first upon the tiles of the roofs and the lids of the chimneys, will then come and visibly shine on their earthly and material hair. But they will no longer be anathemata possessing the special quality of exciting laughter; fictive personalities who would have done no better to remain in the author's brain; or nightmares too far removed from ordinary existence. Note that this very fact will make my poetry finer. You will touch with your own hands the ascending branches of the aorta and the adrenal capsules; and then the feelings! The first five songs have not been useless; they were the frontispiece to my work, the foundation of the structure, the preliminary explanation of my future poetic: and I owed it to myself, before strapping up my suitcases and setting off for the lands of the imagination, to warn sincere lovers of literature with a rapid sketch, a clear and precise general picture, of the goal I had resolved to pursue. Consequently, it is my opinion that the synthetic part of my work is now complete and has been adequately amplified. In this part you learnt that I had set myself the task of attacking man and Him who created man. For the moment, and for later, you need to know no more. New considerations seem to me superfluous, for they would only repeat, admittedly in a fuller, but identical, form, the statement of the thesis which will have its first exposition at the end of this day. It follows from the preceding remarks that from now on my intention is to start upon the analytic part; so true, indeed, is this that only a few minutes ago I expressed the ardent wish that you should be imprisoned in the sudoriferous glands of my skin in order to prove the sincerity of what I am stating with full knowledge of the facts. It is necessary, I know, to underpin with a large number of proofs the argument of my theorem; well, these proofs exist and you know that I do not attack anyone without good reason. I howl with laughter to think that you will reproach me for spreading bitter accusations against mankind of which I am a member (this remark alone would prove me right!), and against Providence. I shall not retract one of my words; but, telling what I have seen, it will not be difficult for me, with no other object than truth, to justify them. Today I am going to fabricate a little novel of thirty pages; the estimated length will, in the event, remain unchanged. Hoping to see the establishment of my theories quickly accepted one day by some literary form or another, I believe I have, after some groping attempts, at last found my definitive formula. It is the best: since it is the novel! This hybrid preface has been set out in a fashion which will not perhaps appear natural enough, in the sense that it takes, so to speak, the reader by surprise, and he cannot well see quite what the author is trying to do with him; but this feeling of remarkable astonishment, from which one must generally endeavour to preserve those who spend their time reading books and pamphlets, is precisely what I have made every effort to produce. In fact, I could do no less, in spite of my good intentions: and only later, when a few of my novels have appeared, will you be better able to understand the preface of the fuliginous renegade.