The Huron; or, Pupil of Nature/Chapter X
CHAPTER X.
THE HURON IS SHUT UP IN THE BASTILLE WITH A JANSENIST.
Mr. Gordon was a healthy old man, of a serene disposition, who was acquainted with two great things; the one was, to bear adversity; the other, to console the afflicted. He approached his companion with an open, sympathizing air, and said to him, while he embraced him:
"Whoever you are that is come to partake of my grave, be assured that I shall constantly forget myself to soften your torments in the infernal abyss where we are plunged. Let us adore Providence that has conducted us here. Let us suffer in peace, and trust in hope."
These words had the same effect upon the youth as cordial drops, which recall a dying person to life and show to his astonished eyes a glimpse of light.
After the first compliments were over, Gordon, without urging him to relate the cause of his misfortune, inspired him by the sweetness of his discourse and by that interest which two unfortunate persons share with each other, with a desire of opening his heart and of disburdening himself of the weight which oppressed him; but he could not guess the cause of his misfortune, and the good man Gordon was as much astonished as himself.
"God must, doubtless," said the Jansenist to the Huron, "have great designs upon you, since he conducted you from Lake Ontario to England, and thence to France; caused you to be baptized in Lower Brittany, and has now lodged you here for your salvation."
"In faith," replied Hercules, "I believe the devil alone has interfered in my destiny. My countrymen in America would never have treated me with the barbarity that I have here experienced; they have not the least idea of it. They are called savages; they are good people, but rustic; and the men of this country are refined villains. I am, indeed, greatly surprised to have come from another world, to be shut up in this, under four bolts with a priest; but I consider what an infinite number of men set out from one hemisphere to go and get killed in the other, or are cast away in the voyage, and are eaten by the fishes. I cannot discover the gracious designs of God over these people."
Their dinner was brought them through a wicket. The conversation turned upon Providence, lettres de cachet, and upon the art of not sinking under disgrace, to which all men in this world are exposed.
"It is now two years since I came here," said the old man, "without any other consolation than myself and books; and yet I have never been a single moment out of temper."
"Ah! Mr. Gordon," cried Hercules, "you are not then in love with your godmother. If you were as well acquainted with Miss St. Yves as I am, you would be in a state of desperation."
At these words he could not refrain from tears, which greatly relieved him from his oppression.
"How is it, then, that tears solace us?" said the Huron; "it seems to me that they should have quite an opposite effect."
"My son," said the good old man, "everything is physical about us; all secretions are useful to the body, and all that comforts it, comforts the soul. We are the machines of Providence."
The ingenuous Huron, who, as we have already observed more than once, had a great share of understanding, entered deeply into the consideration of this idea, the seeds whereof appeared to be in himself, after which he asked his companion why his machine had for two years been confined by four bolts.
"By effectual grace," answered Gordon; "I pass for a Jansenist; I know Arnaud and Nicole; the Jesuits have persecuted us. We believe that the pope is nothing more than a bishop, like another, and therefore Father la Chaise has obtained from the king, his penitent, an order for robbing me, without any form of justice, of the most precious inheritance of man—liberty!"
"This is very strange," said the Huron; "all the unhappy people with whom I have met have been made so solely by the pope. With respect to your effectual grace, I acknowledge I do not understand what you mean. But I consider it as a very great favor that God has let me, in my misfortune, meet with a man who pours into my heart such consolation as I thought myself incapable of receiving."
The conversation became each day more interesting and instructive. The souls of the two captives seemed to unite in one body. The old man had acquired knowledge, and the young man was willing to receive instruction. At the end of the first month he eagerly applied himself to the study of geometry. Gordon made him read "Rohault's Physics," which book was still in fashion; and he had good sense enough to find in it nothing but doubts and uncertainties.
He afterward read the first volume of the "Enquiry After Truth." This instructive work gave him new light.
"What!" said he, "do our imagination and our senses deceive us to that degree? What! are not our ideas formed by objects, and can we not acquire them by ourselves?"
When he had gone through the second volume, he was not so well satisfied; and he concluded it was much easier to destroy than to build.
His colleague, astonished that a young ignoramus should make such a remark, conceived a very high opinion of his understanding, and was more strongly attached to him.
"Your Malebranche," said he to Gordon one day, "seems to have written half his book while he was in possession of his reason, and the other half with the assistance only of imagination and prejudice."
Some days after, Gordon asked him what he thought of the soul, and the manner in which we receive our ideas of volition, grace, and free agency.
"Nothing," replied the Huron. "If I think sometimes, it is that we are under the power of the Eternal Being, like the stars and the elements—that he operates everything in us—that we are small wheels of the immense machine, of which he is the soul—that he acts according to general laws, and not from particular views. This is all that appears to me intelligible; all the rest is to me a dark abyss."
"But this, my son, would be making God the author of sin!"
"But, father, your effectual grace would equally make him the author of sin; for certainly all those to whom this grace was refused would sin; and is not an all-powerful being who permits evil, virtually the author of evil?"
This sincerity greatly embarrassed the good man; he found that all his endeavors to extricate himself from this quagmire were ineffectual; and he heaped such quantities of words upon one another, which seemed to have meaning, but which in fact had none, that the Huron could not help pitying him. This question evidently determined the origin of good and evil; and poor Gordon was reduced to the necessity of recurring to Pandora's box—Oromasdes' egg pierced by Arimanes—the enmity between Typhon and Osiris—and, at last, original sin; and these he huddled together in profound darkness, without their throwing the least glimmering light upon one another. However, this romance of the soul diverted their thoughts from the contemplation of their own misery; and, by a strange magic, the multitude of calamities dispersed throughout the world diminished the sensation of their own miseries. They did not dare complain when all mankind was in a state of sufferance.
But in the repose of night, the image of the charming Miss St. Yves effaced from the mind of her lover every metaphysical and moral idea. He awoke with his eyes bathed in tears; and the old Jansenist forgot his effectual grace, and the abbé of St. Cyran, and even Jansenius himself, to afford consolation to a youth whom he had judged guilty of a mortal sin.
After these lectures and their reasonings were over, their adventures furnished them with subjects of conversation; after this store was exhausted they read together, or separately. The Huron's understanding daily increased; and he would certainly have made great progress in mathematics if the thought of Miss St. Yves had not frequently distracted him.
He read histories, which made him melancholy. The world appeared to him too wicked and too miserable. In fact, history is nothing more than a picture of crimes and misfortunes. The crowd of innocent and peaceable men is always invisible upon this vast theatre. The dramatis personæ is composed of ambitious, perverse men. The pleasure which history affords is derived from the same source as tragedy, which would languish and become insipid, were it not inspired with strong passions, great events, and piteous misfortunes. Clio must be armed with a poniard as well as Melpomene.
Though the history of France is not less filled with horror than those of other nations, it nevertheless appeared to him so disgusting in the beginning, so dry in the continuation, and so trifling in the end (even in the time of Henry IV.); ever destitute of grand monuments, or foreign to those fine discoveries which have illustrated other nations; that he was obliged to resolve upon not being tired in order to go through all the particulars of obscure calamities confined to a little corner of the world.
Gordon thought like him. They both laughed with pity when they read of the sovereigns of Fezensacs, Fesansaguet, and Astrac; such a study could be relished only by their heirs, if they had any. The brilliant ages of the Roman Republic made him sometimes quite indifferent as to any other part of the globe. The spectacle of victorious Rome, the lawgiver of nations, engrossed his whole soul. He glowed in contemplating a people who were governed for seven hundred years by the enthusiasm of liberty and glory.
Thus rolled days, weeks, and months; and he would have thought himself happy in the sanctuary of despair, if he had not loved.
The natural goodness of his heart was softened still more when he reflected upon the prior of our Lady of the Mountain, and the sensible Kerkabon.
"What must they think," he would often repeat, "when they can get no tidings of me? They must think me an ungrateful wretch." This idea rendered him inconsolable. He pitied those who loved him much more than he pitied himself.