Taken by M. d’Asterac to the Isle of Swans I
listen to his Discourse on Creation and Salamanders.
I really do not know how it was possible to tear myself
out of Catherine’s arms. But it is a fact
that in jumping out of her carriage I nearly fell
on M. d’Asterac, whose tall figure leant against
a tree on the roadside. Courteously I saluted
him and showed the surprise I felt at this pleasant
encounter.
“Chance,” he said, “lessens as knowledge
grows; for me it is suppressed. I knew, my son,
that I had to meet you at this place. It is necessary
for me to have a conversation with you already too
long delayed. Let’s go, if you please,
in quest of solitude and quietness required by what
I wish to tell you. Do not become anxious.
The mysteries I desire to unveil before you are sublime,
it is true, but pleasant also.”
Having so spoken he conducted me to the bank of the
Seine opposite the Isle of Swans, which rose out of
the middle of the river like a ship built of foliage.
There he made a sign to a ferryman, whose boat brought
us quickly to the green isle, frequented only by invalids,
who on fine days play there at bowls and drink their
pint of wine. Night lit her first stars in the
sky and lent a humming voice to the myriads of insects
in the grass. The isle was deserted. M.
d’Asterac sat down on a wooden bench at the end
of an alley of walnut-trees, invited me to sit close
to him and spoke:
“There are three sorts of people, my son, from
whom the philosopher has to hide his secrets.
They are princes, because it would be imprudent to
enlarge their power; the ambitious, whose pitiless
genius must not be armed, and the debauchees, who would
find in hidden sciences the means to satiate their
evil passions. But I can talk freely to you,
who are neither debauched—for I quite overlook
the error you nearly gave way to in the arms of yonder
girl—nor ambitious, having lived, till
recently, contented to turn the paternal spit.
Therefore I may disclose to you the hidden laws of
the universe.
“It must not be believed that life is limited
by narrow rules wherein it is manifested to the eyes
of the profane. When they teach that creation’s
object and end was man, your theologians and your
philosophers reason like the multiped of Versailles
or the Tuileries, who believe the humidity of the
cellars is made for their special use and that the
remainder of the castle is uninhabitable. The
system of the world, as Canon Copernicus taught in
the last century, following the doctrines of Aristarchus
of Samos and Pythagorean philosophers, is doubtless
known to you, as there have actually been prepared
some compendiums of them for the urchins of village
schools and dialogues abstracted from them for the
use of town children. You have seen at my house
a kind of machine which shows it distinctly by means
of a kind of clockwork.
