Micromegas and Other Short Fictions (Penguin ed.) by Voltaire

Author:Voltaire [Voltaire]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101492697
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2009-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

The Consoler and the Consoled

One day the great philosopher Citophilus said to a grief-stricken lady, who moreover had good reason to grieve: ‘Dear lady, once upon a time the Queen of England, daughter of the great Henri IV,1 was as unhappy as you. She had been exiled from her kingdoms; she had come close to perishing on the seas amid tempests, and she had seen her royal husband die on the scaffold.’

‘I feel sorry for her,’ said the lady, and began to weep over her own misfortunes.

‘And then,’ continued Citophilus, ‘remember Mary Stuart: she was deeply in love with a gallant musician endowed with a very fine bass-baritone. Her husband killed her musician in front of her eyes. Then her good friend and cousin Elizabeth, who called herself the Virgin Queen, had her beheaded on a scaffold draped in black, after keeping her in prison for eighteen years.’2

‘That was very cruel,’ said the lady, and fell back into her melancholy.

‘Perhaps’, said her consoler, ‘you have heard of the beautiful Queen of Naples, who was seized and strangled?’3

‘I vaguely remember,’ said the sufferer.

‘After dinner’, said the other, ‘I must tell you about a sovereign queen who was dethroned in my own lifetime, and perished on a desert island.’

‘I know all about her,’ replied the lady.

‘Very well, then, I shall tell you what happened to another great princess, whom I introduced to the study of philosophy. She had a lover, as do all great and beautiful princesses. Her father entered her chamber and surprised the lover, whose face was on fire and his eyes glittering like carbuncles, the lady likewise extremely flushed. The young man’s visage so displeased the father that he gave it the most resounding slap that had ever been heard throughout the province. At which the young man took a pair of fire-tongs and cracked the skull of the father, who has never fully recovered, and still bears the scars. The distracted lady leapt from the window and dislocated her foot; to this day she limps visibly though otherwise she has an admirable figure. The lover was condemned to death for fracturing the skull of a great prince. You may imagine the princess’s state of mind while he was being led off to be hanged. I visited her at length in prison; she only ever spoke about her misfortunes.’

‘Why then do you insist on relieving me of mine?’ asked the lady.

‘Because’, replied the philosopher, ‘you must not dwell on them, and because so many great ladies have been so unfortunate, that it ill becomes you to despair. Think of Hecuba,4 think of Niobe.’5

‘Ah!’ said the lady, ‘had I lived in their time, or the time of all those great princesses, and you were to describe my misfortunes to them by way of consolation, do you think they would have listened?’

The next day the philosopher lost his only son, and was close to dying of grief. The lady drew up a list of all the kings who had lost their children, and brought it to him.

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