Caesar or Nothing | Page 4

his political plans. He expressed himself with ease and strength; but he had the uneasy expression of a man who is afraid of something.
"I figure," he said, "that I know what there is to do in Spain. I shall be an instrument. It is for that that I am training myself. I want to create all my ideas, habits, prejudices, with a view to the r?le I am going to play."
"You do not know what Spain is like," said Laura. "Life is very hard here."
"I know that well. There is no social system here, there is nothing established; therefore it is easier to create one for oneself."
"Yes, but some protection is requisite."
"Oh, I will find that."
"Where?"
"I think those Church people we knew in Rome will do for me."
"But you are not a Clerical."
"No." "And do you want to start your career by deceiving people?"
"I cannot choose my means. Politics are like this: doing something with nothing, doing a great deal with a little, erecting a castle on a grain of sand."
"And do you, who have so many moral prejudices, wish to begin in that way?"
"Who told you that accepting every means is not moral?"
"I don't understand how it could be," replied Laura.
"I do," answered her brother. "What is individual morality today? Almost nothing. It almost doesn't exist. Individual morality can come to be collective only by contagion, by enthusiasm. And such things do not happen nowadays; every one has his own morality; but we have not arrived at a scientific moral code. Years ago notable men accepted the moral code of the categoric imperative, in lieu of the moral code based on sin; but the categorical imperative is a stoical morality, a wise man's morality which has not the sentimental value necessary to make it popular."
"I do not understand these things," she replied, displeased.
"The doctor understands me, don't you?" he said.
"Yes, I believe I do."
"For me," Caesar went on, "individual morality consists in adapting one's life to a thought, to a preconceived plan. The man who proposes to be a scientist and puts all his powers into achieving that, is a moral man, even though he steals and is a blackguard in other things."
"Then, for you," I argued, "morality is might, tenacity; immorality is weakness, cowardice."
"Yes, it comes to that. The man capable of feeling himself the instrument of an idea always seems to me moral. Bismarck, for instance, was a moral man."
"It is a forceful point of view," said I.
"Which, as I see, you do not share," he exclaimed.
"As things are today, no. For me the idea of morality is attached to the idea of pity rather than to the idea of force; but I comprehend that pity is destructive."
"I believe that you and Caesar," Laura burst forth, "by force of wishing to see things clear, see them more vaguely than other people. I can see all this quite simply; it appears to me that we call every person moral who behaves well, and on the contrary, one that does wicked deeds is called immoral and is punished."
"But you prejudge the question," exclaimed Caesar; "you take it as settled beforehand. You say, good and evil exist...."
"And don't they exist?"
"I don't know."
"So that if they gave you the task of judging mankind, you would see no difference between Don Juan Tenorio and Saint Francis of Assisi?"
"Perhaps it was the saint who had the more pleasure, who was the more vicious."
"How atrocious!"
"No, because the pleasure one has is the criterion, not the manner of getting it. As for me, what is called a life of pleasure bores me."
"And judging from the little I know of it, it does me too," said I.
"I see life in general," he continued, "as something dark, gloomy, and unattractive."
"Then you gentlemen do not place the devil in this life, since this life seems unattractive to you. Where do you find him?"
"Nowhere, I think," replied Caesar; "the devil is a stupid invention."

AT TWILIGHT
The twilight was beginning.
"It is chilly here by the river," I said. "Let us go to the house."
We went up by a sloping path between pear-trees, and reached the vestibule of the house. From afar we heard the sound of the stage-coach bells; a headlight gleamed, and we saw it pass by and afterwards disappear among the trees. "What a mistake to ask more of life than it can give!" suddenly exclaimed Laura. "The sky, the sun, conversation, love, the fields, works of art ... think of looking on all these as a bore, from which one desires to escape through some violent occupation, so as to have the satisfaction of not noticing that one is alive."
"Because noticing that one is alive is disagreeable," replied her brother.
"And why?"
"The idea! Why? Because life is not an idyll, not by a good deal. We live by killing,