Chapter 5 three

Three leagues from the Maupra Rock, near Fromental, you may have seen a solitary ancient tower in the woods, famous for the tragic death of a captive, and the executioner who traveled here thought, It would have been nice to hang him without trial to please his lord, a former Maupra, more than a hundred years ago. In the time of which I speak to you, the Garzo Tower was abandoned and on the verge of collapse; it was the property of the state, and more from neglect than kindness, it was allowed to dwell there an old poor man with a peculiar Opinion, alone, is known locally as "Mr. Patience". ①Patience means patience in the original text.

I replied, "I heard my nanny's grandmother speak of him; she regarded him as a wizard." That is so; and since we are on the subject, I must tell you exactly who this Patience is; for more than once I shall have occasion to refer to him in my narrative, and I have had occasion to know him well. Patience was a country philosopher.Heaven had endowed him with a high degree of intellect, but he had little education, and by an unknown fate his mind could not take in the meager education which he had been able to receive.He had attended a Carmelite priest's school somewhere, and instead of feeling and showing talent, he took more pleasure in playing truant than the rest of his schoolmates.His nature was brooding, gentle and lazy, but proud, loving independence to the point of wildness; pious, but hostile to all precepts; somewhat critical, contemptuous and intolerant of hypocrites.The rules of the monastery were against him, and he was expelled from the school because of one or two conversations with the monks.From that time on, he was the great enemy of what is called monastic life, and he professed to support the parish priest of Brionte, who was accused of being a Jansenist.But the curate was no more successful in educating Patience than the monks.Despite his mighty strength and his scientific curiosity, the young farmer displayed an irrepressible aversion to all work, physical or intellectual.He preached a philosophy of nature, to which the curate had difficulty answering.He said that if you don't need money, you don't need work.Only modest needs require no money.Patience did it himself; at the age of passion, he was ascetic, never drank water, never went to taverns, could not dance, was always very awkward and timid with women, and his eccentric character, serious face And a little cynical temper and not at all attractive to women.As if he loved to avenge this unpopularity with contempt, or to console himself with wisdom, he, like Diogenes of old, relished the pleasure of degrading others; He passed under the shade of a tree to make a childish sarcasm—a flash of his merciless insight.At times his intolerance of everything showed itself in a bitter way, and left behind him a cloud of misery to troubled consciences.This made him fierce enemies; and the instigation of an absurd hatred, combined with the astonishment his eccentric manner aroused, earned him the reputation of a wizard. ① One of the Catholic Mendicant Orders, founded in the middle of the 12th century on Mount Carmel in Palestine. It advocates assiduous practice. There are strict rules in the association, such as prohibition of speech, isolation from the world, etc.

②The Ransen faction is a sect in the Catholic Church in the 17th century. It was once denounced as heresy by the Pope of Rome and banned by edict, but many people still believe in it. ③ Diogenes (413 BC 327 BC), the ancient Greek cynic philosopher. When I told you just now that Patience lacked education, I did not express myself exactly.His understanding was eager to understand the high mysteries of nature, and wanted to soar into the sky; and during the first few lessons, the curate Jansen, perplexed and disturbed by the audacity of his pupil, tried to calm the pupil, To listen to him, he had to wear out his lips, and withstand the onslaught of bold questions and brilliant interrogations, so that he had no time to teach the alphabet; and after ten years of learning intermittently with capriciousness and need, Patience still could not read.Sweat fell on the book, and he managed to read a page within two hours, and still did not understand the meaning of most of the words expressing abstract thoughts.But these abstract thoughts remained in him, and they were always felt by others when they saw him and heard him speak; , listening to him speak, both very pleasant, but also can not help but admire.

He was always very serious, he said what he said, and he refused to compromise with any dialectical thought.An ascetic by nature and principle, who ardently preached the theory of freedom from false interests, and who was unshakable in the practice of forbearance, he broke through the poor curate's gap; as he often told me in his later years, In these discussions he acquired philosophical knowledge.The good Jansenists, in order to resist this onslaught of natural logic, were obliged to cite the writings of all the priests of the Church to prove it, and even to confirm it with the teachings of all the saints and scholars of antiquity.Patience's round eyes widened in his head (that's how he said it), and the words faltered on his lips.All he wanted was to learn without much effort, to have the doctrines of the great men explained to him at length, and their lives narrated.Seeing his concentration and silence, the other party thought he had won; but just when he thought he had conquered this rebellious spirit, Patience heard the village clock announce the hour of midnight, rose up, and took kindly farewell to his master, The abbe escorted him to the door, and his terse and sharp thoughts compared Roma and Plato, Eusebe and Seneca.Tertullian was confused with Aristotle, and the abbe was dumbfounded. ① Jerome (347-420), a religious theorist, served as secretary to the Pope; Plato (428-348 BC), an ancient Greek philosopher; Euseb (265-340), a religious historian, served as a bishop ; Seneca (4-65 BC), an ancient Roman statesman and tragedy writer; Tertulian (about 155-about 222), a religious writer who wrote in Latin; Aristotle (384 BC). 322 BC), ancient Greek philosopher.

The curate did not quite admit the superiority of this savage understanding.He was amazed at how many winter evenings he passed by the fire with this peasant without being bored or weary; Latin, he found, of all their conversations, the one repulsive and the other full of fallacies.He knew the decent way of life of Patience, and he explained the transcendence of the minds of his pupils by the influence and charm that virtue produced and radiated around him.Every night, he faced God, humbly berating himself for not being able to argue a genuinely Christian point of view with his students.He confessed to the guardian angel that the pride in his learning, the pleasure he felt in seeing his pupils listen to him so reverently, had stirred him a little beyond the bounds of religious education; Quoting secular works, wandering with his disciples in the past lands, he even felt a dangerous pleasure in picking pagan flowers that had not been watered by the holy water of baptism, and a priest did not allow such interest. Breathe floral.

As for Patience, he loved the curé.It was his only friend, his only connection with society, and his only connection with God through the light of science.The farmer greatly exaggerates the knowledge of his guide.He did not know that even the most enlightened civilized man often regresses, or does not go back to the roots of human knowledge at all.Had Patience been freed from all his worries, he would have found that his teacher was often wrong, and that it was the teacher himself, and not the truth.Unaware of this, and seeing that the experience of the ages contradicted his inherent sense of justice, he fell into constant reverie; In the midst of his apprehensions, he became more and more convinced of the nonsense that vilified him for witchcraft.

The abbey did not like the priest.The few monks whom Patience had exposed hated Patience.Both priests and disciples were persecuted.The vile monk did not miss the opportunity to accuse the parish priest in the bishop of being devoted to the occult and in league with the sorcerer Patience.In and near the village, a religious war was waged.Anyone who does not support the monastery supports the curate, and vice versa.Patience didn't bother to get into the fight.One morning, weeping and embracing his friend, he said to the priest: "I love you only in the world, and I don't want you to be the object of persecution; I have never known nor loved anyone but you, and I will go to the woods and live like a primitive man. My property has a field At fifty livres per man; my hands have but this land, and half my meager income pays the tithes I owe my lord; If someone suspends your duties, deprives you of your income, and you plow a field, let me say a word, and you will see that my arms will not grow numb from idleness."

It was in vain for the priest to try to oppose this determination.Patience went away, with all his luggage a coat slung over his back, and a compendium of the Epictetian doctrine, which he was particularly fond of, and which, from his constant study, he read three times a day. Page, not so tired.The country hermit went to live in the wilderness.He first built a hut in the woods with the cut branches and leaves.But surrounded by wolves, he retreated to the low hall of the Garzo Tower, and made a bed out of tesserae and tree trunks, which was a handsome piece of furniture, and the interior was furnished with roots, wild berries, sheep's milk products, and daily food. It wasn't too bad compared to when he was in the village before.This is not an exaggeration.You have to see the peasants in certain parts of Varenna to form an idea of ​​the simplicity that allows a person to live in good health.In this ascetic habit, Patience remained an exception.Wine never stained his lips, and bread was always an extra to him.But he did not hate the teachings of Pythagoras.After that, he rarely met his friends. He told his friends that he just didn’t believe in reincarnation, and he didn’t force himself to stick to a vegetarian diet. Instead, he couldn’t help being secretly happy that he could be a vegetarian and would no longer see innocent animals being killed every day. . ① Epictet (50-125 or 130), a Greek ascetic philosopher.

②Pythagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician in the 6th century BC. Patience was at forty years old when he took this curious decision; when I first saw him he was sixty years old and of unusual physical strength.Every year he has the habit of wandering; and as I relate to you my life, I shall detail the life of the monks of Patience. At the time when this story happened, the forest warden was not so much out of pity as out of fear of being enchanted. After many difficulties, he finally gave in and allowed him to live freely in the Garzo Tower, but declared to him that in case of a storm, , the tower might fall over his head; to which Patience replied philosophically that if his fate was to be doomed, the first tree in the forest was no different from the top of Gazzo's tower.

Before introducing my character Patience, I beg you to excuse the lengthy and tedious opening of this biography, but let me also say that during these twenty years the thinking of the abbe has taken a new direction.He loved philosophy, and this worthy man could not help letting this love spread over all philosophies, even the most unorthodox.Regardless of his internal rebellion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's works took him to new fields; one morning, after returning from visiting a patient, he met Patience collecting plants for dinner on the Cleven Rock, and sat down. Next to him, on the stone of the Druidic priest, unknowingly proclaimed the creed of the Savoyard priest.It was this poetic religion that Patience understood better than the old orthodoxy.His interest in listening to the outlines of the new doctrine prompted the curate to arrange a private meeting with him in some remote places in Varennes, where they were to go as if they had met by chance.Patience's imagination was still fresh and fervent in solitude, at these mysterious schism meetings, and infected with all the magic of the thoughts and hopes that were then brewing in France from the court of Versailles to the sparsely populated bushes. And crazy.He became obsessed with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and had everything read to him that he could understand without prejudice to his duties as curate.Then he got a copy and read it non-stop in the Garzo Tower.At first, the curate passed this manna to him sparingly, letting him appreciate the great ideas and lofty feelings of the philosophers, thinking that it would prevent him from the poison of anarchism.But all this old science, all these well-placed quotations, in a word, all the theology of the clergy, was swept away like a breakable bridge by the torrent of rough eloquence and irrepressible passion that Patience had amassed in the wilderness. up.The parish priest had to give in, and retreated in horror.He found that there were cracks everywhere in his heart, which were rumbling.The new sun rises on the political horizon, disturbs the wisdom of all, and dissolves his wisdom like snow under the first spring breeze.The passions of Patience, the visions of his strange and lyrical life that gave him an inspired breath, the romantic veneer that their mysterious relationship had (the spirit of rebellion was ennobled by the meanness of the monastery) , all this seized the priest so strongly that by 1770 he had turned away from Jansenism, sought in vain a foothold in various paganisms, and then plunged into the abyss of philosophy, where Patience was always before him. To show the abyss that Roman Catholic exorcisms tend to cover in vain. ① The food given by God to the ancient Israelites in the Bible.