Bouvard and Pecuchet Part 13

"The springs of life are hidden from us, the ailments too numerous, the remedies problematical. No reasonable definitions are to be found in the authors of health, disease, diathesis, or even pus."

However, all this reading had disturbed their brains.

Bouvard, whenever he caught a cold, imagined he was getting inflammation of the lungs. When leeches did not abate a st.i.tch in the side, he had recourse to a blister, whose action affected the kidneys. Then he fancied he had an attack of stone.

Pecuchet caught lumbago while lopping the elm trees, and vomited after his dinner--a circ.u.mstance which frightened him very much. Then, noticing that his colour was rather yellow, suspected a liver complaint, and asked himself, "Have I pains?" and ended by having them.

Mutually becoming afflicted, they looked at their tongues, felt each other's pulses, made a change as to the use of mineral waters, purged themselves--and dreaded cold, heat, wind, rain, flies, and princ.i.p.ally currents of air.

Pecuchet imagined that taking snuff was fatal. Besides, sneezing sometimes causes the rupture of an aneurism; and so he gave up the snuff-box altogether. From force of habit he would thrust his fingers into it, then suddenly become conscious of his imprudence.

As black coffee shakes the nerves, Bouvard wished to give up his half cup; but he used to fall asleep after his meals, and was afraid when he woke up, for prolonged sleep is a foreboding of apoplexy.

Their ideal was Cornaro, that Venetian gentleman who by the regulation of his diet attained to an extreme old age. Without actually imitating him, they might take the same precautions; and Pecuchet took down from his bookshelves a _Manual of Hygiene_ by Doctor Morin.

"How had they managed to live till now?"

Their favourite dishes were there prohibited. Germaine, in a state of perplexity, did not know any longer what to serve up to them.

Every kind of meat had its inconveniences. Puddings and sausages, red herrings, lobsters, and game are "refractory." The bigger a fish is, the more gelatine it contains, and consequently the heavier it is.

Vegetables cause acidity, macaroni makes people dream; cheeses, "considered generally, are difficult of digestion." A gla.s.s of water in the morning is "dangerous." Everything you eat or drink being accompanied by a similar warning, or rather by these words: "Bad!"

"Beware of the abuse of it!" "Does not suit everyone!" Why bad? Wherein is the abuse of it? How are you to know whether a thing like this suits you?

What a problem was that of breakfast! They gave up coffee and milk on account of its detestable reputation, and, after that, chocolate, for it is "a ma.s.s of indigestible substances." There remained, then, tea. But "nervous persons ought to forbid themselves the use of it completely."

Yet Decker, in the seventeenth century, prescribed twenty decalitres[6]

of it a day, in order to cleanse the spongy parts of the pancreas.

This direction shook Morin in their estimation, the more so as he condemns every kind of head-dress, hats, women's caps, and men's caps--a requirement which was revolting to Pecuchet.

Then they purchased Becquerel's treatise, in which they saw that pork is in itself "a good aliment," tobacco "perfectly harmless in its character," and coffee "indispensable to military men."

Up to that time they had believed in the unhealthiness of damp places.

Not at all! Casper declares them less deadly than others. One does not bathe in the sea without refres.h.i.+ng one's skin. Begin advises people to cast themselves into it while they are perspiring freely. Wine taken neat after soup is considered excellent for the stomach; Levy lays the blame on it of impairing the teeth. Lastly, the flannel waistcoat--that safeguard, that preserver of health, that palladium cherished by Bouvard and inherent to Pecuchet, without any evasions or fear of the opinions of others--is considered unsuitable by some authors for men of a plethoric and sanguine temperament!

What, then, is hygiene? "Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side," M. Levy a.s.serts; and Becquerel adds that it is not a science.

So then they ordered for their dinner oysters, a duck, pork and cabbage, cream, a Pont l'Eveque cheese, and a bottle of Burgundy. It was an enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, almost a revenge; and they laughed at Cornaro! It was only an imbecile that could be tyrannised over as he had been! What vileness to be always thinking about prolonging one's existence! Life is good only on the condition that it is enjoyed.

"Another piece?"

"Yes, I will."

"So will I."

"Your health."

"Yours."

"And let us laugh at the rest of the world."

They became elated. Bouvard announced that he wanted three cups of coffee, though he was not a military man. Pecuchet, with his cap over his ears, took pinch after pinch, and sneezed without fear; and, feeling the need of a little champagne, they ordered Germaine to go at once to the wine-shop to buy a bottle of it. The village was too far away; she refused. Pecuchet got indignant:

"I command you--understand!--I command you to hurry off there."

She obeyed, but, grumbling, resolved soon to have done with her masters; they were so incomprehensible and fantastic.

Then, as in former days, they went to drink their coffee and brandy on the hillock.

The harvest was just over, and the stacks in the middle of the fields rose in dark heaps against the tender blue of a calm night. Nothing was astir about the farms. Even the crickets were no longer heard. The fields were all wrapped in sleep.

The pair digested while they inhaled the breeze which blew refres.h.i.+ngly against their cheeks.

Above, the sky was covered with stars; some shone in cl.u.s.ters, others in a row, or rather alone, at certain distances from each other. A zone of luminous dust, extending from north to south, bifurcated above their heads. Amid these splendours there were vast empty s.p.a.ces, and the firmament seemed a sea of azure with archipelagoes and islets.

"What a quant.i.ty!" exclaimed Bouvard.

"We do not see all," replied Pecuchet. "Behind the Milky Way are the nebulae, and behind the nebulae, stars still; the most distant is separated from us by three millions of myriametres."[7]

He had often looked into the telescope of the Place Vendome, and he recalled the figures.

"The sun is a million times bigger than the earth; Sirius is twelve times the size of the sun; comets measure thirty-four millions of leagues."

"'Tis enough to make one crazy!" said Bouvard.

He lamented his ignorance, and even regretted that he had not been in his youth at the Polytechnic School.

Then Pecuchet, turning him in the direction of the Great Bear, showed him the polar star; then Ca.s.siopeia, whose constellation forms a Y; Vega, of the Lyra constellation--all scintillating; and at the lower part of the horizon, the red Aldebaran.

Bouvard, with his head thrown back, followed with difficulty the angles, quadrilaterals, and pentagons, which it is necessary to imagine in order to make yourself at home in the sky.

Pecuchet went on:

"The swiftness of light is eighty thousand leagues a second; one ray of the Milky Way takes six centuries to reach us; so that a star at the moment we observe it may have disappeared. Several are intermittent; others never come back; and they change positions. Every one of them is in motion; every one of them is pa.s.sing on."

"However, the sun is motionless."

"It was believed to be so formerly. But to-day men of science declare that it rushes towards the constellation of Hercules!"

This put Bouvard's ideas out of order--and, after a minute's reflection:

"Science is constructed according to the data furnished by a corner of s.p.a.ce. Perhaps it does not agree with all the rest that we are ignorant of, which is much vaster, and which we cannot discover."

So they talked, standing on the hillock, in the light of the stars; and their conversation was interrupted by long intervals of silence.

At last they asked one another whether there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be gigantic, those of Mars of middle stature, those of Venus very small.

Unless it should be everywhere the same thing. There are merchants up there, and gendarmes; they trade there; they fight there; they dethrone kings there.

Some shooting stars slipped suddenly, describing on the sky, as it were, the parabola of an enormous rocket.