第53章

The declaimers want one to bury in the ground the wealth one has amassed by the fortune of arms, by agriculture, by commerce and by industry.They cite Lacedaemon; why do they not cite also the republic of San Marino?

What good did Sparta to Greece? Did she ever have Demosthenes, Sophocles, Apelles, Phidias? The luxury of Athens produced great men in every sphere;Sparta had a few captains, and in less number even than other towns.But how fine it is that as small a republic as Lacedaemon retains its poverty.

One arrives at death as well by lacking everything as by enjoying what can make life pleasant.The Canadian savage subsists, and comes to old age like the English citizen who has an income of fifty thousand guineas.

But who will ever compare the land of the Iroquois to England?

Let the republic of Ragusa and the canton of Zug make sumptuary laws, they are right, the poor man must not spend beyond his powers; but I have read somewhere:"Learn that luxury enriches a great state, even if it ruins a small."If by luxury you understand excess, everyone knows that excess in any form is pernicious, in abstinence as in gluttony, in economy as in generosity.

I do not know how it has happened that in my village where the land is ungrateful, the taxes heavy, the prohibition against exporting the corn one has sown intolerable, there is nevertheless barely a cultivator who has not a good cloth coat, and who is not well shod and well fed.If this cultivator toiled in his fields in his fine coat, with white linen, his hair curled and powdered, there, certainly, would be the greatest luxury, and the most impertinent; but that a bourgeois of Paris or London should appear at the theatre clad like a peasant, there would be the most vulgar and ridiculous niggardliness.

When scissors, which are certainly not of the remotest antiquity, were invented, what did people not say against the first men who pared their nails, and who cut part of the hair which fell on their noses? They were treated, without a doubt, as fops and prodigals, who bought an instrument of vanity at a high price, in order to spoil the Creator's handiwork.What an enormous sin to cut short the horn which God made to grow at the end of our fingers! it was an Outrage against the Deity! It was much worse when shirts and socks were invented.One knows with what fury the aged counsellors who had never worn them cried out against the young magistrates who were addicted to this disastrous luxury.Philosophical Dictionary: General Reflection on Man GENERAL REFLECTION ON MAN IT needs twenty years to lead man from the plant state in which he is within his mother 's womb, and the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of the reason begins to appear.

It has needed thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure.It would need eternity to learn something about his soul.It takes an instant to kill him.Philosophical Dictionary: Man in the Iron Mask MAN IN THE IRON MASK THE author of the " SiecIe de Louis XIV." is the first to speak of the man in the iron mask in an authenticated history.The reason is that he was very well informed about the anecdote which astonishes the present century, which will astonish posterity, and which is only too true.He was deceived about the date of the death of this singularly unfortunate unknown.The date of his burial at St.Paul was March 3rd, 1703, and not 1704.(Note.--According to a certificate reported by Saint-Foix, the date was November 20th, 1703.)He was imprisoned first of all at Pignerol before being so on St.Margaret's Islands, and later in the Bastille; always under the same man's guard, Saint-Mars, who saw him die.Father Griffet, Jesuit, has communicated to the public the diary of the Bastille, which testifies to the dates.He had this diary without difficulty, for he held the delicate position of confessor of prisoners imprisoned in the Bastille.

The man in the iron mask is a riddle to which everyone wishes to guess the answer.Some say that he was the Due de Beaufort: but the Duc de Beaufort was killed by the Turks at the defence of Candia, in 1669; and the man in the iron mask was at Pignerol, in 1662.Besides, how would one have arrested the Duke de Beaufort surrounded by his army? How would one have transferred him to France without anybody knowing anything about it? And why slould he have been put in prison, and why this mask?

Others have considered the Comte de Vermandois, natural son of Louis XIV., who died publicly of the small-pox in 1683, with the army, and was buried in the town of Arras.

Later it was thought that the Duke of Monmouth, whose head King James II.had cut off publicly in London in 1685, was the man in the iron mask.

It would have been necessary for him to be resuscitated, and then for him to change the order of the times, for him to put the year 1662 in place of 1685; for King James who never pardoned anyone, and who on that account deserved all his misfortunes, to have pardoned the Duke of Monmouth, and to have caused the death, in his place, of a man exactly like him.It would have been necessary to find this double who would have been so kind as to have his neck cut off in public in order to save the Duke of Monmouth.

It would have been necessary for the whole of England to have been under a misapprehension; for James then to have sent his earnest entreaties to Louis XIV.to be so good as to serve as his constable and gaoler.Then Louis XIV.having done King James this little favour, would not have failed to have the same consideration for King William and for Queen Anne, with whom he was at war; and he would carefully have preserved in these two monarchs' consideration his dignity of gaoler, with which King James had honoured him.