Six Degrees Could Change the World

An earlier version of this essay appeared on another site.

Schoolbooks tell us that the Second Industrial Revolution occurred around the advent of the steam engine, about one hundred fifty years ago.  What these books often fail to mention is the human and ecological cost of such advancements.  Now we live in a world of plastics and mass production, of artificial heat and ventilation, of power, locomotion and wireless computers – all of which makes for a much easier existence than that of our forebears.  And as in any pact with uncontrollable and unknown forces who offer us success, we will one day be asked to pay our debts.  Consequently, for those of us who use the otherwise innocuous Celsius scale, this film may come as a surprise. 

It is a docu-dramatization of the work of a British scientist whose publications have gained him both notoriety and what he really wants, more attention to the warming of our planet.  That the globe is but 0.8 degrees C (1.44 F) hotter than it once was would not appear to be an alarming change; much more violent fluctuations in worldwide temperature have been theorized as far back in time as scientists can delve.  What is alarming, however, is the rate at which these changes have been occurring.  It used to be that a degree or two of climatic vacillation would take place over thousands or millions of years, thus dissipating its potential effects on the environment (even the mighty ice ages were creeping, almost imperceptible affairs); now calculations are in decades or even calendar years.  So if I were to claim that since the middle of the nineteenth century we have spurned the earth's riches in favor of synthetic, industrial greed I would not only be expressing my political opinion, I would be announcing a crisis.

The crisis in question can be measured, as it were, by degrees.  According to Lynas, one degree Celsius of change, a figure we are steadily approaching owing to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, would continue to bring milder winters to places like England, now a burgeoning vineyard.  Such changes have occurred before in the world's history and have allowed unlikely countries to grow unusual crops, but these lands have then in time reverted to more homeostatic temperatures.  At two degrees about a fifth of the world's trees (especially in wetter places such as rainforests) are predicted to perish along with most of the coral reefs that regulate life beneath and around much of our increasingly acidic ocean waters.  At two degrees Greenland's glaciers, whose size has fluctuated gradually every 150,000 years or so, would melt to such an extent as to raise tides around the world and endanger seafront property.  Up to two degrees Lynas suggests that we can handle the changes, however radical they may be at times, and slowly reduce the temperature through conservation of emissions.  But in life as in art, significance first comes at three. 

At three degrees the climatic changes we would regularly witness might revive our memories of the terrible heat wave that spread across Europe in the summer of 2003, an event that killed thousands in a matter of weeks.  It is forgotten because few people feel bad for Europeans (or, for that matter, Americans) when they are stricken by natural disaster, a much more commonplace occurrence in less temperate climates.  This tidbit is hardly a coincidence: there lurks a strange collation between hotter weather and greater financial deprivation.  With Europe's GDP on average being three times that of the world's average and its continent almost completely bereft of extreme winters or summers, hurricanes, earthquakes or tornadoes, what would happen at four degrees more?  "A Scandinavian beach would become the next Saint-Tropez."  This may sound like a great plot for an ecological thriller – a Swedish energy mogul using the highest of technologies to augment the greenhouse effect and become the richest man in the world – except that it could very well happen without such diabolism.

At five and six degrees we are not expected to be able to survive.  That is to say, we may physically exist, but our planet will more closely resemble the dystopian deserts so common in science fiction, worlds without water, without rules and without hope.  Every disaster movie in which you have seen the world implode, every scenario you wished would never occur – all this is the future of ecological abuse.  Awarded a gallery of trophies in his native England and abroad, Lynas’s book contains research that supports the work of advocates such as Senator Al Gore and other high-profile altruists who should not have to warn us twice. And Six Degrees Could Change the World plays out exactly like a disaster movie, down to the computer-generated effects, except that this is no longer the bailiwick of fiction writers but of actual science.  Nevertheless, our warnings come still in time.  In the last twenty years we have made progress, and recycling and conservation in many parts of the world is prolific and protected by legislation.  How ironic that life has come to resemble the art that once offered it escape and imaginary doomsday scenarios that would end as soon as the lights came on in the theater.  A couple of hours of apocalyptic mayhem, but then the open, fresh air and carefree life – such was the world once upon a time.  Let us hope that future generations do not have to escape to the movies to experience it.   

Secular Knowledge not a Principle of Action

We have already belabored the back-and-forth between those who believe in something greater than themselves and those who think themselves the jewels atop evolution's crown, and readers of these pages know how I stand, not being able to do anything else.  The universe, say the men of science, is a vast mystery in which there is little room for divine revelation, yet we have discovered one hundred billion planets (or perhaps one billion galaxies each with one billion planets, the number is as fluid as the authorities that count).  What may or may not have happened two thousand years ago in a warm and intellectually rich desert land is a legend perpetrated by a long list of global conspirators, but the progression of those prehistoric monsters who died millions of years before we became sentient is as clear as the microscope used to examine their fossils.  And the universe itself, that bulging mass of infinite energy, decided one day that it should be, and exploded into what would become our world a long time down the line, so thinking that the universe is actually a stage designed by an Author would be the most preposterous mistake ever committed.  If you are convinced fully by these arguments, please proceed to your nearest popular bookseller and find your reading material in the largest and brashest displays scattered at strategic points throughout the store.  If, however, the more you consider these asinine gourds of leaking potions, all of which have the same bitter chemical aftertaste, the more you find the whole concoction a vile emetic, you may want to order your books from less complacent sources.  Which brings us to this short essay.

There is a basic principle in Newman's works that cannot be rephrased only reiterated, and it involves the concepts of assumption and assent.   The casual thinker − he knows who he is − may flip through a few pages of this masterpiece and conclude that the whole premise is based on religious faith, and he would only be wrong in his flipping.  Casual reviewers of the same work have commented that Newman's approach jettisons the medieval and ancient philosophies for something terribly modern, at least modern by the standard of the nineteenth century, but again this conclusion is the result of too much flipping and too many conclusions.  A simpler approach may be as follows.  Let us say that you believe your girlfriend to be loyal and loving − for the vast majority of us an assumption which a relationship can and should predicate.  You ask yourself time and again why you think this way, and are led to a number of observations that buttress and cancel each other in rather tawdry existential fashion.  First you assume that she loves you because you love her and love is as natural as the morning dew, as the morning itself, as oxygen.  You decide that this is so on the evidence of the hypocorisms and affection you exchange; you are supported in your sensations by our omnipresent and omniscient men of science who boldly proclaim that love, like chocolate and fear, is a chemical reaction illuminating a certain part of your brain as if it were a pile of links of a staggered Christmas tree light display.  You discard this sentiment when its hollowness begins to repulse you and then conclude that she loves you because she has made a decision to love.  You just happen to be the person with whom she is now as if life were a roulette wheel and she fell on your number.  This approach also has its drawbacks, namely that her willpower has been transformed into a justification for affection, which to both the logical and emotional mind cannot possibly be love.  So you entertain a third notion, love as destiny, as preprogrammed methodology on the part of natural selection or divine proportion, and understand that you must accept your lot as it is handed to you because otherwise your existence will henceforth be mired in regret.  At length you come to the fourth conclusion in your eternal square, that of deception, and now I should mention the essay in the title.

Newman does not believe in any conclusions, he believes in what he modestly calls a beginning.  He tells us that many people will risk their lives for dogma, but never for a conclusion; he knows that people die for realities not calculations.  The rather gauche modern films and novels that describe suicidal characters as keeping a tally of their world in neurotic detail should not perish because of that detail, but because that detail has now replaced their entire reality (an instructive point made in this fine novel).  He has nothing horribly against science, as no one who believes in better living standards and health for humanity should, but he has something very much against a life of perpetual deduction which begins, appropriately enough, ex nihilo:

Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof.  We shall ever be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences, and divines into textuaries.  We shall never get at our first principles.  Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyze your elements, sinking further and further, and finding "in the lowest depth a lower deep," till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism.  I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral governance from the physical world.  Life is for action.  If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.

We may cast aside the criticism that life is not really for action, because to come to that assumption much action must already have been taken.  It is perhaps for that reason that a skeptic who has been treated with the cold, callous end of life's rod can be more justified in his mistrust of the world, and, for his insufferable ignorance, a young brash fool who thinks himself a god with two feet and lungs all the more chastened.

Whatever you may think of Newman, you will have to conclude that conclusions are based on assumptions (or perhaps that assumptions only end in further assumptions).  As silly and ultimately contradictory as it is to postulate that we may separate ourselves from the stream of time and ethics to reach some petty captions on our own, we must also understand that youth for natural reasons needs to rebel.  It needs to think itself invincible because only once it has been disabused of this notion can it weigh life's value and our cobweb of aging and loss.  If religion "has never been a message, a history, or vision," we can assert without fear of perjury that these are precisely the three elements common to all periods of youth.  We learn about ourselves and the world through our parents and their history, and we envision our future most often through the paradigms herein established, the future as an anagram of the past.  Yes, this can be said of faith, except that all future, past and present scenarios and thoughts are but anagrams of some greater meaning still.  That, if anything, is motivation enough to live what has been given us and to love.  And for what is love if not assent to the transcendental?

Bergson, "On the Pragmatism of William James" (part 2)

The conclusion to an essay by this French philosopher.  The original can be found in this collection.

What kind of judgment is then true?  We call true a statement that agrees with reality.  But of what does this agreement consist?   Here we would like to see something akin to the resemblance of a portrait and its model: a true statement would be one that copied reality.  Nevertheless, let us consider the question: we will see that only in rare and exceptional cases does this definition of the true become applicable.  What is real is this or that specific fact reaching such and such a point in place and time, that is the singular and changing thing.  On the contrary, most of our statements are general and imply a certain stability in their objects.  Let us take a reality as close as possible to experience, something such as "heat distends bodies."  Of what could this possibly be a copy? 

It is possible, in a certain sense, to copy the distension of a specific body in specific movements by photographing it in different phases.  Metaphorically I could even say that the statement "this iron bar is distended" is the copy of what occurs when I observe the distension of an iron bar.  But a truth that applies to all bodies without involving in particular any one of those I have seen copies and reproduces nothing.  We would like nonetheless to have it copy something and philosophy has always attempted to satisfy our desires in this regard.  For the philosophers of antiquity, there was beyond time and space a world where all possible truths had lain for eternity.  Human statements were for them all the more truthful because they faithfully copied eternal truths.  Modern thought has made truth tumble from the sky to the earth; yet even modern thinkers saw something there which antedated our statements.  Truth might lie in things and facts: science would go look for it, lure it out of its hiding place, and bring it all to light.  A statement such as "heat distends bodies" would then be a law which governed facts, which reigned, if not above them, then at least amongst them, a law truly contained in our experience in whose extraction we are limited.  Even a philosophy like Kant's that claims all scientific truth is relative to the human mind considers true statements as givens a priori in human experience.  Once this experience has been organized in general by human thought, the work of science would consist exclusively of piercing the tough carapace of facts whose truth is lodged within, like a nut in its shell.

This concept of truth is natural to our minds and natural as well to philosophy because it is natural to think of truth as a perfectly coherent and systematized whole within a framework of logic.  This framework would be truth itself; all science has to do is find it.  But pure and simple experience tells us nothing of the sort, and James sticks to experience.  Experience presents us with a flow of phenomena: if this or that statement related to one of these phenomena allows us to master those which come after or even simply to predict them, we say that this statement is true.  A proposition such as "heat distends bodies," a proposition suggested by viewing the distension of a specific body, acts in such a way that we can predict how other bodies may react in the presence of heat.  It helps us to move from an old experience to new ones; it is the conduit, nothing more.  Reality flows and we flow with it; and we call true any statement which, in directing us across moving reality, allows us to grasp hold of it and put ourselves in the best conditions to act.

We can see the difference between this idea and the traditional view of reality.  We normally define the true by the conformity that already exists; James defines it by a relationship that does not exist yet.  The true, according to James, does not copy something that has been or that is, it announces what will be; rather, it prepares our action towards what is going to be.  Philosophy has a natural tendency to want to examine truth retrospectively; James looks it prospectively.

To be more exact, other doctrines make truth into something antecedent to the very specific act of man who has formulated this truth for the first time.  He is the first person to see this truth, we may say, but it was waiting for him like America was waiting for Christopher Columbus.  Something hid it from everyone's purview and, so to speak, covered it; it was then he who discovered it.  But James's concept is completely different.  He does not deny that reality is independent, more or less, of what we may say or think of it.  Yet truth that can only attach itself to what we state or affirm of reality would appear to him to be created by our statements or affirmations.  We invent reality to make use of reality, just as we invent mechanical devices to make use of the forces of nature.  It seems to me that we could summarize the essential argument of pragmatism's concept of truth in such a formula: whereas for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it is an invention.

It does not follow, however, that truth is arbitrary.  A mechanical invention has no value apart from its practical utility.  In the same way, to be true a statement should increase our influence on things.   It is no less than the creation of a specific creative mind and it did not precede the effort of this mind any more than, for example, the phonograph preceded Edison.  Doubtless the inventor of the phonograph had to study the properties of sound, which comprises a reality.  Yet his invention is then added to this reality as an absolutely new thing which might never have been produced had he never existed.  Thus for a reality to be viable it must have its roots in realities; but these realities are nothing more than the terrain upon which this reality grows, and other flowers would also have grown there if the wind had scattered other grains. 

According to pragmatism, truth is made little by little thanks to individual contributions from a large number of inventors.  Had these inventors never existed, had there been others in their stead, we would have had an entirely different body of truths.  Reality has evidently remained what it is, or close to it; but there could have been other routes we might have taken for the convenience of our movements.  And here we are not only talking about scientific truths.  We cannot construct a sentence, we can no longer even utter a word these days without accepting certain hypotheses which were created by our ancestors and which could have been very different from what they are.  When I say "my pencil just fell under the table," I am certainly not promulgating a fact of experience since what sight and touch show me is simply that my hand is open and that it let go of what it was holding.  A baby strapped to his seat who sees fall the toy he is playing with probably does not conclude that this object continues to exist.  Rather, he does not possess the distinct idea of an "object," that is to say, of something that subsists, invariable and independent, through the diversity and mobility of appearances that take place.  The first person who decided to believe in this invariability and this independence made a hypothesis: it is this hypothesis that we currently adopt every time we use a noun, every time we speak.  Our grammar would have been different, the articulations of our thinking would have been different, if humanity in the course of its evolution had preferred to adopt hypotheses of a different kind.

The structure of our mind is therefore to a great extent our own doing, or at the very least the doing of some among us.  This is, in my opinion, the most important tenet of pragmatism even if it has not been explicitly released.  It is in this way that pragmatism continues from Kantianism.  Kant said that truth depended on the structure of the human mind.  Pragmatism adds, or at the very least implies, that the structure of the human mind is the effect of the free initiative of a specific number of individual minds.

This is again not to say, however, that truth depends on each of us; one might as well believe that each one of us invented the phonograph.  What it means is that, from the diverse types of truth, the one that is the closest to coinciding with its object is not scientific truth, nor the truth of common sense, nor, more generally, the truth of an intellectual order.  All truth is a route traced across reality; yet of all these routes, it is among those on which we could have attained a very different direction if our attention had been oriented in a different sense or if we had aimed at another type of utility.  On the contrary, it is of the sort whose direction is marked by reality itself.  It is of those which correspond, if one can put it thus, to the currents or flows of reality.  Doubtless these routes still depend on us to a certain extent since we are free to resist a current or to follow it.  And even if we follow it, we can inflect our movements in different directions, associated at the same time as we are subject to the force present therein.  It is no less true that these currents are not created by us: they form an integral part of reality.  Pragmatism borders, therefore, on inverting the order in which we are accustomed to placing the diverse types of truth.  Outside of truths that transmit brute sensation, it is the truths of feeling that would extend the deepest roots.  Should we be comfortable in saying that all truth is an invention, I think in order to remain faithful to the thinking of William James we would have to establish between the truths of feeling and scientific truths the same type of difference as, for example, between a sailboat and a steamboat.  They are both human inventions; yet the former has only a slight role in artifice; it assumes the wind's direction and makes visible to the eye the force employed.  In the latter, on the other hand, it is the artificial mechanism that takes up the most space.  It recovers the force that it puts to use and assigns it a direction that we have chosen ourselves.

Thus the definition that James bestows upon truth creates a body with its conception of reality.  Should reality not be this economic and systematic universe which our logic likes to imagine, should it not be sustained by a framework of intellectuality, truth of an intellectual order would then be a human invention which has the effect of utilizing reality rather than introducing us into it.  And if reality does not form a whole, if it is mobile and multiple, made of currents which cross, then the truth born from contact with one of these currents – truth sensed before being conceived – is more capable than truth conceived simply to seize and stockpile reality itself.

It is therefore this theory of reality that we must first attack in our criticism of pragmatism.  We can raise objections against it, and as far as it is concerned, we would make some qualifications.  Yet no one would contest its depth and originality.  Nor would anyone, having closely examined the conception of truth attached to pragmatism, mistake its moral elevation.  It has been said that James's pragmatism is nothing more than a form of skepticism that debases truth and subordinates it to material utility; that discourages and dissuades disinterested scientific research.  Such an interpretation would never occur to those who were to read the work attentively, and it would profoundly surprise those who had the good fortune of knowing the man himself.  No one loved truth with greater ardor; no one sought it with greater passion.  He was motivated by an immense concern, and from science to science, from anatomy and physiology to psychology, from psychology to philosophy, he moved bent over all the large problems, uncaring of the rest, oblivious of himself.  His whole life he observed, he experimented, he meditated.  And as if he had not done enough, he also dreamed, falling into his final sleep; he dreamed of extraordinary experiences and superhuman efforts by which he could continue, until death and beyond, to work with us for the greater good of science and the greater glory of truth.                 

Bergson, "On the Pragmatism of William James" (part 1)

The first part to an essay by this philosopher and man of letters which served as the introduction to the French translation of this book.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

How can one speak about pragmatism after William James?  And what would we be able to say that has not been already said, and said better, in that enthralling and charming book of which we have here such a faithful translation?  We would hesitate to speak at all if James's thoughts were not so often diminished, or altered, or distorted by the interpretations we impute to them.  Surely many ideas that circulate risk interference between the reader and the book, as well as the imposition of an artificial obscurity upon a work that is the epitome of clarity.

We would poorly understand James's pragmatism if we didn't begin by modifying the current notion that we have of reality in general.  We speak of the "world" or the "cosmos," and those words, according to their origin, indicate something simple, more or less well-structured.  We say "universe," and the word makes us think of the possible unification of things.  We could be spiritualists, materialists, pantheists just as easily as we could be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied in the common sense of the word: we always imagine many simple principles through which the set of material and moral things could be explained.

Our intelligence has become enamored with simplicity.  It economizes effort and wishes for nature to be arranged in such a way so as not to draw our attention; to be thought of should require the smallest possible amount of work.  It is present up until that point at which we need elements or principles to reconstruct its indefinite series of objects and events.      

But if, instead of ideally reconstructing things to give our reason supreme satisfaction we were to grasp these things purely and simply based on what experience permits, we would think and express ourselves in a wholly different manner.  Whereas our intelligence, with its habits of economy, imagines effects in strict proportion to their causes, prodigious nature places in the cause much more than required to produce its effect.  Whereas our motto is Only what we need, nature's motto is More than what is needed – too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything.  Reality, in James's view, is redundant and superabundant.  I think that the same relationship has been established between this reality and the reality reconstructed by philosophers as between the life we live every day and the life that actors portray every evening on the stage.  In the theater, every person does not say what he needs to say nor does what he needs to do; scenes have clear divisions – each play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and all of this is most parsimoniously distributed with a view to a dénouement that may be happy or tragic.  But, in life, we utter an endless array of useless things, we undertake an endless array of useless acts; there are rarely neat and streamlined situations.  Nothing really happens with such simplicity or as completely or beautifully as we might like.  Scenes encroach upon one another; things never begin or end; there is never an entirely satisfying dénouement or an absolutely decisive act.  All the concomitant effects are therefore ruined.  Such is human life.  And such is also what James undoubtedly thinks of reality in general. 

Certainly, our experience is not incoherent.  At the same time as it presents to us things and facts, it shows us the connections between things and the relationships between facts.  These relationships, according to James, are just as real and directly observable as the things and facts themselves.  But relationships fluctuate and things are fluid.  It is well beyond this dry universe in which philosophers compose well-divided and well-constructed elements, and where each part is no longer only connected to another part, as experience tries to suggest, but is coordinated with Everything – which is what is suggested by reason.

James's "pluralism" has no other meaning than this.  Antiquity was represented as a closed, halted, finite world, a hypothesis that corresponds to certain demands of our reason.  Modern people tend to think of the infinite, which is another hypothesis that satisfies other demands of our reason.  From the point of view that James assumes, which is of pure experience or "radical empiricism," reality no longer appears to be finite or infinite, but simply indefinite.  It flows without our being able to ascertain whether it flows in one direction, nor whether it is always the same river flowing past.

Our reason is less satisfied.  It feels less at ease in a world where it can no longer find, as in a mirror, its own image.  And, doubtless, the importance of human reason is diminished.  But to what degree will the importance of man himself – of man in his entirety, in his willfulness and sensibility as well as in his intelligence – then find itself increased!

The universe conceived by our reason is, as it were, a universe that infinitely surpasses human experience.  The peculiar thing about reason is that it prolongs the data of experience, extending them by means of generalization, with the aim of having us conceive of things far past what we will ever glimpse.  In such a universe man is supposed to do few things and occupy little space: what he attributes to his intelligence he will take from his will.  Most of all, having accorded his mind the power of encompassing everything, he is then obliged to imagine all things in terms of thought: of his aspirations, his desires, and his enthusiasm he can hardly ask for clarification in a world where everything is accessible to be considered by him in advance, as if translatable into pure ideas.  His sensibility would never know how to clarify his intelligence, whose enlightenment was his own doing.

Most philosophies, therefore, shrink our experience with regard to emotion and willpower while at the same time prolonging this experience indefinitely in terms of thought.  What James asks of us is not to add too much to experience from hypothetical views, nor to mutilate something that is already solid.  We are not at all sure about what experience offers us; but we have to accept experience integrally, and our feelings provide this experience to the same extent as our perceptions do, to the same extent, consequently, as "things" do.  In the eyes of William James, complete man counts for something.

He counts for even more in a world that does not squash him by its immensity.  We are surprised by the importance that James, in one of his books, attributes to Fechner's curious theory that states Earth is an independent being blessed with a divine soul.  It may be that he sees in this a convenient means to symbolize – perhaps even to express – his own thinking.  The things and facts that compose our experience constitute for us a human world, connected undoubtedly to others, but so distanced from them and so close to us that we have to consider it, in practice, both sufficient for man and self-sufficient.  With things and events we create a body – we meaning everything of which we are conscious of being, everything we experience.  The powerful feelings that stir our souls at certain, privileged moments are forces just as real as those which interest a physicist: man creates them no more than he creates heat or light.  According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere which cuts across large spiritual currents.  If many among us grow rigid, others allow themselves to be carried off.  And he is one of those souls who open themselves as widely as possible to these salubrious airs.  Such people are those with the souls of mystics.  We know how sympathetically James studied these people.  When his book The Varieties of Religious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a series of very vivid descriptions and penetrating analyses – psychology, they said, of religious feeling.  How wrong they were about the author's mentality!  The truth is that James studied the mystic soul in the same way that we study the weather on a fine spring day to feel the caress of the breeze, or how, on the seashore, we survey the comings and goings of ships and the filling of their sails so as to learn in which direction the wind is blowing.  Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly lifted and transported: how could they not make us extract from real life, as if it were a scientific experiment, that force that lifts and transports?  There we have, without a doubt, the origin; there lies the idea that inspired the "pragmatism" of William James.  In his opinion, the most important truths for us to know are the truths that have been felt or lived before having been thought.

All this time we have said that there are truths that result from feeling as much as from reason.  And all this time we have also said that apart from the ready truths we have found, there are other truths that we assist in making which depend in part on our willpower.  Yet it should be noted that, in James's work, this idea takes on new meaning and force.  It blooms thanks to the conception of reality which is peculiar to his philosophy in a general theory of truth.

Comment on paie ses dettes quand on a du génie

A brief essay ("How to pay your debts when you're a genius") by this French man of letters on another French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

The following story was told to me with the request that I never repeat it; and for that reason I wish to tell absolutely everyone.

He was sad judging by his knitted brows, his large mouth less distended and lippy than normal; his manner of speaking was punctuated by brusque pauses as he paced the double passage of the Opera; he was sad.   

He it was indeed, the greatest business and literary mind of the nineteenth century; he, the poetic intellect lined in figures like the office of a treasurer; he, the man of mythological bankruptcies, and phantasmagoric and hyperbolic enterprises whose light he always forgot to turn on; the greatest pursuer of dreams endlessly in search of the absolute; he, the most curious, the most comical, the most interesting and the most vain character in The Human Comedy; he, that eccentric as unbearable in life as he was delicious on paper, that fat child and bloated genius so brimming with qualities that he hesitated to subtract some for fear of losing others, and to spoil that incorrigible and fatal monstrosity.

What could make such a great man fall into such a black mood and walk as he was walking, his chin on his paunch?  What could make him scrunch his forehead into The Skin of Chagrin?

Did he of dream of four-cent pineapples, a suspended bridge made from creepers, a stairless villa with boudoirs set in chiffon?  What princess approaching forty would have glanced at him with one of those deep looks which beauty owes to genius?  Or his brain, as heavy as an industrial machine, is it racked by all the Sufferings of an Inventor?

No, alas, no!  The sadness of a great man is a very commonplace form of sadness, earthly, ignoble, shameful and ridiculous.  He was in that mortifying situation we all know in which every passing minute carries on its wings the chance of salvation; in which, his eye pinned to the clock, the genius of invention senses the need to double, triple, decuple its forces in proportion to the time that remains and the approaching speed of that fatal hour.  The illustrious author of the theory of the bill of exchange had a bill of twelve hundred francs to pay by the next day and the evening was already getting on.

In these sorts of cases it sometimes happens that the mind – hurried, devastated, kneaded, and crushed by the cogs of necessity – suddenly hurls itself, by an unexpected and victorious burst, outside that very prison.

This is what probably happened to the great novelist, for a smile appeared on his lips at the contraction that inflicted upon him lines of pride;  his eyes gained their composure, and our man, calm and reseated, made his way towards Rue Richelieu with a sublime and cadenced step.

He entered the house where a rich and prosperous businessman had already abandoned the work of the day to tea and a fireside corner.  He was received with all the honors his name deserved, and after a few minutes expounded the purpose of his visit in these words:   

"Would you like to have, on the day after tomorrow, in Le Siècle and Les Débats, two fabulous articles along the lines of, 'Varieties of the French in their own words,' two fabulous articles written and signed by me?  My fee is fifteen hundred francs.  So for you this is a gold mine."  

It turned out that the publisher, in contrast to his counterparts in the industry, found such an argument quite reasonable because a deal was immediately struck.  Changing his mind, our man insisted that the fifteen hundred francs be delivered upon the appearance of the first article; then he returned peacefully towards the passage of the Opera.
   
A few minutes later he notified a small young man with an aggressive and spiritual physiognomy who had recently served as a breathtaking preface for the Rise and Fall of César Birotteau, and who was already known in journalistic circles for his clownish, almost impish verve; piety had yet to trim his talons, and to him the religious tabloids happily opened their candle snuffers:

"Edward, would you like to have one hundred fifty francs tomorrow?"  "Gee whiz!"  "Alright then, come have a coffee."  

The young man drank a cup of coffee which initially brought his little southern constitution to a fever.

"Edward, tomorrow I must have three large columns on 'The Varieties of the French in their own words'; by morning, mind you, and early at that.   The whole article has to be recopied and signed in my own hand; this point is paramount."

The great man said these words with such admirable accentuation and that arrogant tone which he sometimes offers to a friend he cannot welcome into his home: "A thousand pardons, dear friend, to leave you at the door; I have a private audience with a princess whose honor is at my disposal.  You surely understand ..."

Edward shook his hand as if he were his benefactor and ran off to the task.
   
The great novelist ordered his second article on Rue de Navarin.

The first article appeared two days later in Le Siècle.  Strangely, it was signed neither by the small young man nor by the great author, but by a third name quite well known at that time in Bohemia for his tomcat romances and Comic Opera.

His second friend was and still is fat, lazy and lethargic; moreover, he has no ideas whatsoever and can only string words together in the fashion of Osage necklaces.  And because it takes much longer to cram three long columns of words than to create a whole book of ideas, his article came out only a few days later.  It was included not in Les Débats, but in La Presse.

The bill of twelve hundred francs was paid; everyone was perfectly satisfied except the publisher, who was almost so.  And this is how to pay your debts ... when you're a genius.

If some smart Aleck took all this for a back-page joke, an assault on the glory of the greatest man of our century, he would be shamefully wrong.  I only sought to show that the great poet knew how to settle a bill of exchange as easily as he could write the most mysterious and intriguing of novels.