 Section 12 of A Journey Round My Room by Xavier de Maestra, translated by Henry Atwell. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 39. A Dialogue. I promised a dialogue, and I will keep my word. It was daybreak. The rays of the sun were gliding the summit of Mount Viso and the tops of the highest hills on the island beneath our feet. My soul was already awake. This early awakening may have been the effect of those night visions which often excite in her a fatiguing and useless agitation, or perhaps the carnival, then drawing to a close, was the secret cause. For this season of pleasure and folly influences the human organisation much as do the phases of the moon and the conjunctions of certain planets. However this may be, my soul was awake and wide awake when she shook off the bands of sleep. For some time she had shared, though confusedly, the sensations of the other. But she was still encumbered by the sways of night and sleep, and these sways seemed to her transformed into gores and fine linen and Indian lawn. My poor soul was, as it were, enwrapped in all this paraphernalia, and the god of sleep that he might hold her still more firmly under his sway, added to these bonds, dishevelled tresses of flaxen hair, ribbon bows and pearl necklaces. Really it was pitiful to see her struggle in these toils. The agitation of the nobler part of myself communicated itself to the other, and the latter, in its turn, reacted powerfully upon my soul. I worked myself at last into a state which it would be hard to describe, while my soul, either sagaciously or by chance, hit upon a way of escaping from the gauzes by which it was being suffocated. I know not whether she discovered an outlet, or whether, which is a more natural conclusion. It occurred to her to raise them, at all events. She found a means of aggress from the labyrinth. The tresses of dishevelled hair were still there, but they were now rather help than hindrance. My soul seized them, as a drowning man clutches the sedge on a river's bank, but the pearl necklace broke in the act, and the unstrung pearls rolled on the sofa, and from the sofa to Madame Autcastelle's floor, for my soul, by an eccentricity for which it would be difficult to give a reason. Fancy she was at that lady's house. Then a great bunch of violets fell to the ground, and my soul, which then awoke, returned home, bringing with her common sense and reality. She strongly disapproved, as you will readily imagine, of all that has passed in her absence, and here it is that the dialogue begins which forms the subject of this chapter. Never had my soul been so ungraciously received. The complaint she thought fit to make at this critical moment fully suffice to stir up domestic strife. A revolt, a formal insurrection, followed. What! said my soul. Is it thus that during my absence, instead of restoring your strength by quiet sleep that you may be better able to do my bidding, you have the insolence, the expressing was rather strong, to give yourself up to transport which my authority has not sanctioned. Little accustomed to this haughty tone, the other angrily answered, Really, madame. This madame was meant to remove from the discussion anything like familiarity. Really. This affectation of virtuous decorum is highly becoming to you. Is it not to the sallies of your imagination, and to the extravagant ideas that I owe what in me displeases you? What right have you to go on those pleasant excursions so often, without taking me with you? Have I ever complained about your attending the meetings in the Imperium or in the Elysian Fields? Your conversations with celestial intelligences? Your profound speculations? A little railery here, you see? Your castles in the air? And your transcendental systems? And have I not a right, when you leave me in this way, to enjoy the blessings bestowed upon me by nature, and the pleasures she places before me? My soul, surprised at so much vivacity and eloquence, did not know how to reply. In order to settle the dispute amicably, she endeavoured to veil with the semblance of good nature the reproaches that had escaped her. But, that she might not seem to take the first steps towards reconciliation, she affected a formal tone. Madame, she said, with assumed cordiality. If the reader thought the word misplaced when addressed to my soul, what will he say of it now, if he called to mind the cause of the quarrel? But my soul did not fill the extreme absurdity of this mode of expression, so much does passion obscure the intellect. Madame, she said, nothing, be assured, would give me so much pleasure as to see you enjoy those pleasures of which your nature is susceptible, if even I did not participate in them, whereas not that such pleasures are harmful to you, injuriously affecting the harmony which, here my soul was rudely interrupted. No, no, I am not the dupe of your pretended kindness, the sojourn we are compelled to make together in this room in which we travel, the wound which I received, which still bleeds and which nearly destroyed me, is not all this the fruit of your overweening conceit and your barbarous prejudices. My comfort, my very existence, is counted as nothing when your passions sway you. And then, forsooth, you pretend that you take an interest in my welfare, and that your insults spring from friendship. My soul saw very well that the part she was playing on this occasion was no flattering one. She began, too, to perceive that the warmth of the dispute had put the cause of it out of sight. Profiting from this circumstance, she caused a further distraction by saying to Jeanetti, who at that moment entered the room, make some coffee. The noise of the cups attracted all the rebels' attention, who forthwith forgot everything else. In like manner we show children a toy to make them forget the unwholesome fruit for which they beg and stamp. While the water was being heated, I insensibly fell asleep. I enjoyed that delightful sensation about which I have already entertained my readers, and which you experience when you feel yourself to be dozing. The agreeable rattling Jeanetti made with the coffee pot echoed in my brain, and set all my sense of nerves vibrating, just as a single harp string when struck will make the octaves resound. At last I saw, as it were, a shadow passing before me. I opened my eyes, and there stood Jeanetti. Ah, what an aroma! How agreeable a surprise! Coffee, cream, a pyramid of dry toast! Good reader, come breakfast with me! Chapter 40 Imagination What a wealth of delight has kind nature given to those who can enjoy them. Who can count the innumerable phases they assume in different individuals, and at different periods of life. The confused remembrance of the pleasures of my boyhood sends a thrill through my heart. Shall I attempt to paint the joys of youth whose soul glows with all the warmth of love, at an age when interest, ambition, hatred, and all the base passions that degrade and torment humanity are unknown to him, even by name. During this age, too short alas, the sun shines with a brightness it never displays in afterlife. The air is then purer, the streams clearer and fresher, and nature has aspects, and the woods have paths, which in our riper age we never find again. Oh, what perfumes those flowers breathe! How delicious are those fruits! With what colours is the morning sky adorned? Men are all good, generous, kind-hearted, and women all lovely and faithful. On all sides we meet with cordiality, frankness, and unselfishness. Nature presents to us nothing but flowers, virtues, and pleasures. The excitement of love, and the anticipation of happiness, do they not fill our hearts to the brim with emotions no less lively and various? The sight of nature and its contemplation, whether we regard it as a whole or examine its details, opens to our reason an immense field of enjoyment. Soon the imagination, brooding over the sea of pleasures, increases their number and intensity. The various sensations so unite and blend as to form new ones. Dreams of glory mingle with the palpitations of love. Benevolence moves hand in hand with self-esteem. Melancholy, from time to time, throws over us her solemn livery and changes our tears to joy. Thus the perceptions of the mind, the feelings of the heart, the very remembrance of sensations are inexhaustible sources of pleasure and comfort to man. No wonder, then, that the noise Jonetti made with the coffee pot and the unexpected appearance of a cup of cream should have impressed me so vividly and so agreeably. Chapter 41 The Traveling Coat I put on my travelling coat, after having examined it with a complacent eye, and forthwith resolved to write a chapter ad hoc that I might make it known to the reader. The form and usefulness of these garments being pretty generally known, I will treat specially of their influence upon the minds of travellers. My winter travelling coat is made of the warmest and softest stuff I could meet with. It enveloped me entirely from head to foot, and when I am in my armchair, with my hands in my pocket, I am very like the statue of Vishnu one sees in the pagodas of India. You may, if you will, tax me with a prejudice when I assert the influence a traveller's costume exercises upon its wearer. At any rate, I can confidently affirm with regard to this matter, that it would appear to me as ridiculous to take a single step of my journey round my room in uniform, with my sword at my side, as it would to go forth into the world in my dressing-gown. Were I to find myself in full military dress? Not only should I be unable to proceed with my journey, but I really believe I should not be able to read what I have written about my travels. Still less to understand it. Does this surprise you? Do we not every day meet with people who fancy they are ill because they are unshaven, or because someone has thought they looked poorly, and told them so? Dress has such influence upon men's minds, that there are valetudinarians who think themselves in better health than usual when they have on a new coat and well-powdered wig. They deceive the public and themselves by their nicety about dress, until one finds some fine mourning they have died in full fig, and their death startles everybody. And in the class of men among whom I live, how many there are who, finding themselves clothed in uniform, firmly believe they are officers, until the unexpected appearance of the enemy shows them their mistake. And more than this. If it be the king's good pleasure to allow one of them to add to his coat a certain trimming, he straightway believes himself to be a general, and the whole army gives him the title without any notion of making fun of him. So great an influence has a coat upon the human imagination. The following illustration will show still further the truth of my assertion. It sometimes happened that they forgot to inform the Count de Blanc some days before the approach of his turn to Mount Gard. Early one morning, on the very day on which this duty fell to the Count, a corporal awoke him and announced the disagreeable news. But the idea of getting up there and then, putting on his gaiters, and turning out without having thought about it the evening before, so disturbed him that he preferred reporting himself sick and staying at home all day. So he put on his dressing gown and sent away his barber. This made him look pale and ill, and frightened his wife and family. He really did feel a little poorly. He told everyone he was not very well, partly for the sake of appearances, and partly because he positively believed himself to be indisposed. Gradually the influence of the dressing gown began to work. The slops he was obliged to take upset his stomach. His relations and friends sent to ask after him. He was soon quite ill enough to take to his bed. In the evening Dr. Ranson found his pulse hard and feverish, and ordered him to be bled the next day. If the campaign had lasted a month longer, the sick man's case would have been past cure. Now, who can doubt about the influence of travelling coats upon travellers, if he reflect as poor counts de Blanc, thought more than once that he was about to perform a journey to the other world for having inopportunely donned his dressing gown in this. End of Section 12 Section 13 of A Journey Round My Room by Xavier de Maistre. Translated by Henry Atwell. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 42. A sparsia's buskin. I was sitting near my fire after dinner. Enveloped in my habit de voyage, and freely abandoning myself to its influence, the hour for starting was, I knew, drawing nigh. But the fume is generated by digestion rose to my brain, and so obstructed the channels along which thoughts glide on their way from the senses, that all communication between them was intercepted. And as my senses no longer transmitted any idea to my brain, the latter, in its turn, could no longer emit any of that electric fluid with which the ingenious Doctor Valley resuscitates dead frogs. After reading this preamble, you will easily understand why my head fell on my chest, and why the muscles of the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, being no longer excited by the electric fluid, became so relaxed that a volume of the works of the Marquis Cariccioli, which I was holding tightly between these two fingers, imperceptibly eluded my grasp and fell upon the hearth. I had just had some coolers, and my conversation with the persons who had left the room had turned upon the death of Dr. Signa, an eminent physician then laterally deceased. He was a learned and hard-working man, a good naturalist, and a famous botanist. My thoughts were occupied with the merits of this skilful man, and yet, I said to myself, where is possible for me to evoke the spirits of those whom he has perhaps dismissed to the other world? Who knows but that his reputation might suffer some diminution? I travelled insensibly to a dissertation on medicine and the progress it has made since the time of Hippocrates. I asked myself whether the famous personages of antiquity who died in their beds as Pericles, Plato, and the celebrated Aspasia and Hippocrates died after the manner of ordinary mortals, of some putrid of inflammatory fever, and whether they were bled and crammed with specifics. To say why these four personages came into my mind rather than any others is out of my power. For who can give reasons for what he dreams? All that I can say is that my soul summons the Doctor of Coz, the Doctor of Turin, and the famous statesman who did such great things and committed such grave faults. But as to his grateful friend, I humbly own that it was the other who beckoned her to come. Still, however, when I think of the interview, I am tempted to fill some little pride, for it is evidence that in this dream the balance and favour of reason was as four to one. Pretty fair this, me thinks, for a lieutenant. However this may be, whilst giving myself up to the reflections I have described, my eyes closed and I fell fast asleep. But upon shutting my eyes, the image of the personages of whom I had been thinking remained painted upon that delicate canvas we call memory. And these images, mingling in my brain with the idea of the evocation of the dead, it was not long before I saw advancing in procession, Hippocrates, Plato, Pericles, Aspasia, and Doctor Signo in his Bobwig. I saw them all seat themselves in chairs ranged about to the fire. Pericles alone remained standing to read the newspapers. If the discovery of which you speak were true, said Hippocrates to the Doctor, and had they been as useful to the healing art as you affirm, I should have seen the number of those who daily descend to the gloomy realm of Pluto decrease. But the ratio of its inhabitants, according to the registers of Minos, which I have myself verified, remains still the same as formerly. Doctor Signo turned to me and said, You have without doubt heard these discoveries spoken of. You know that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, that the immortal spell and zany explained the process of digestion, the mechanism of which is now well understood. And he entered upon a long detail of all the discoveries connected with physics, and of the host of remedies for which we are now indebted to chemistry. In short, he delivered an academic discourse in favour of modern medicine. But am I to believe, I replied, that these great men were ignorant of all you have been telling them, and that their souls, having shuffled off this mortal coil, still meet with any obscurities in nature? Ah, how great is your error, exclaimed the proto-physician of the Peloponnesus. The mysteries of nature are as closely hidden from the dead as from the living. Of one thing we who linger on the banks of the sticks are certain, that he who created all things alone knows the great secret which men vainly strive to solve. And, as did he, turning to the doctor, do be persuaded by me to divest yourself of what clings to you of the party spirit you have brought with you from the sojourn of mortals. And since, seeing that Sharon daily ferries over in his boat as many shades as here to fore, the labours of a thousand generations, and all the discoveries men have made, have not been able to prolong their existence. Let us not uselessly weary ourselves in defending an art which, among the dead, cannot even profit its practitioners. Thus to my great amazement spoke the famous Hippocrates. Dr. Sigmund smiled, and as spirits can neither withstand evidence nor silence truth, he not only agreed with Hippocrates, but, blushing after the manner of the disembodied intelligences, he protested that he had himself always had his doubts. Pericles, who had drawn near the window, heaved a deep sigh, the cause of which I divine. He was reading a number of the moniteur, which announced the decadence of the arts and the sciences. He saw illustrious scholars desert their sublime conceptions to invent new crimes, and shuddered at hearing a rabble herd compare themselves with the heroes of generous Greece, and this forsooth, because they put to death without shame or remorse, venerable old men, women and children, and coolly perpetrated the blackest and most useless crimes. Plato, who had listened to our conversation without joining in it, and seeing it brought to a sudden and unexpected close, thus spoke. I can readily understand that the discoveries great men have made in the various branches of natural science do not forward the art of medicine, which can never change the course of nature, except at the cost of life. But this will certainly not be so with the researchers that have been made in the study of politics. It locks inquiries into the nature of the human understanding, the invention of printing, the accumulated observations drawn from history, the number of excellent books which have spread sound information even among the lower orders. So many wonders must have contributed to make men better, and the happy republic I conceived, which the age in which I lived caused me to regard as an impracticable dream, no doubt now exists upon the earth. At this question the honest doctor cast down his eyes, and only answered by tears. In wiping them with his pocket handkerchief, he involuntarily moved his wig on one side, so that a part of his face was hidden by it. He got, exclaimed Aspasia, with a scream, how strange a sight, and is it a discovery of one of your great men that has led you to the idea of turning another man's skull into a headdress? Aspasia, from whom our philosophical dissertations had elicited nothing but gapes, had taken up a magazine of fashions which lay on the chimney piece, the leaves of which she had been turning over for some time when the doctor's wig made her utter this exclamation. Finding the narrow rickety seat upon which she was sitting uncomfortable, she had, without the least ceremony, placed her two bare legs, which were adorned with bandolettes, on the straw-bottom chair between her and me, and rested her elbow upon the broad shoulders of Plato. It is no skull, said the doctor, addressing her and taking off his wig, which he threw on the fire. It is a wig, madame, and I know not why I did not cast this ridiculous ornament into the flames of Tartarus when I first came among you, but absurdities and prejudices adhere so closely to our miserable nature that they even follow us sometimes beyond the grave. I took singular pleasure in seeing the doctor thus abduer his physique and his wig at the same moment. I assure you, said Espasia, that most of the headdresses represented in the pages I had been turning over deserve the same fate as yours, so very extravagant are they. The fair Athenian amused herself vastly in looking over the engravings, and was very reasonably surprised by the variety and oddity of modern contrivances. One figure especially struck her. It was that of a young lady with a really elegant headdress which Espasia only thought somewhat too high. But the piece of gauze that covered the neck was so very full you could scarcely see half her face. Espasia, not knowing that these extraordinary developments were produced by Starch, could not help showing a surprise which would have been redoubled, but inversely, had the gauze been transparent. But to explain, she said, why women of the present day seem to wear dresses to hide rather than to clothe them. They scarcely allow their faces to be seen, those faces by which alone their sexes to be guessed. So strangely are their bodies disfigured by the eccentric folds of their garments. Among all the figures represented in these pages I do not find one with the neck, arms and legs bare. How is it your young warriors are not tempted to put an end to such a fashion? Who would appear, she added, that the virtue of women of this age which they parade in all their articles of dress greatly surpasses that of my contemporaries. As she ended these words, as Espasia turned her eyes on me as if to ask her a reply, I pretended not to notice this, and in order to give myself an absent air took up the tongs and pushed away among the embers the shreds of the doctor's wig which had escaped the flames. Observing presently afterwards that one of the bandolettes which clasped Espasia's buskin had come undone, permit me, said I, charming lady, and eagerly stooping, stretched out my hands towards the chair on which I had fancied I saw those legs about which even great philosophers went into ecstasies. I am persuaded that at this moment I was very near genuine some nambulism so real was the movement of which I speak. But Rose, who happened to be sleeping in the chair, thought the movement was meant for her and jumping nimbly into my arms she drove back into Hades the famous shades my travelling coat had summoned. Chapter 43 Liberty, delightful realm of imagination which the benevolent being has bestowed upon man to console him for the disappointments he meets within real life. This day, certain persons on whom I am dependent have effect to restore me to Liberty as if they had ever deprived me of it as if it were in their power to snatch it from me for a single moment and to hinder me from traversing at my own good pleasure the vast space that ever lies open before me they have forbidden me to go at large in a city a mere speck and have left me open to the whole universe in which immensity and eternity obey me. I am now free then or rather I must enter again into bondage the yoke of office is again to weigh me down and every step I take must conform with the exigencies of plightness and duty. Fortunate shall I be if some capricious goddess do not again make me forget both and if I escape from this new and dangerous captivity oh why did they not allow me to finish my captivity was it as a punishment that I was exiled to my chamber to that delightful country in which abound all the riches and enjoyments of the world as well they might consign a mouse to a granary still, never did I more clearly perceive that I am double than I do now whilst I regret my imaginary joys I feel myself consoled I am born along by an unseen power which tells me I need the pure air and the light of heaven and that solitude is like death once more I don my customary garb my door opens and I wander under the spacious portagos of the Strada della Pol a thousand agreeable visions float before my eyes yes, there is that mansion that door, that staircase I thrill with expectation in like manner the act of slicing a lemon gives you a foretaste that makes your mouth water poor animal take care end of a journey round my room by Xavier de Maistre translated by Henry Atwell