The Man Who Sees Ghosts (8 page)

“He has at least acted very much against his own interests by sharpening the eyes of those he wanted to deceive and, through the exposure of such a fabricated lie, made their faith in miraculous powers weaker. You yourself, my lord, are the best refutation of his plan, if indeed he had one.”

“He was perhaps mistaken about me—but, for all that, he judged things no less shrewdly. Could he have foreseen that I would remember the very thing that could be the key to the miracle? Was it part of his plan that the minion he used should give himself away to me as he did? How do we know whether this Sicilian did not greatly overstep his authority? —Certainly in the case of the ring—And it is indeed principally this one circumstance which decided my distrust of this man. How easy it is for
a well-laid, subtle plan to begin to unravel because of a cruder agent! It certainly cannot have been his intention that the conjurer, like some loud-mouthed market stallholder, should trumpet his fame before us—that he should serve us up with those fairy-tales, which, upon the slightest reflection, can be seen to be full of contradictions. So, for example, how can this charlatan have the face to allege that his miracle worker must break off all human relations on the stroke of midnight? Did we not ourselves seen him in our midst at this time?”

“That is true,” I exclaimed. “He must have forgotten that!”

“But it is in the nature of this kind of man to exceed his commission and, by overdoing things, spoil everything that a more modest and moderate deception would have achieved magnificently.”

“Nevertheless, my lord, I still cannot bring myself to see this whole affair as nothing more than a contrived performance. And why? The Sicilian’s terror, his convulsions, his loss of consciousness, the whole wretched condition of the man, which inspired even us with compassion—was all this only a well-rehearsed act? Even if we grant that the histrionics of conjuring tricks could lead to such extremes, nevertheless the art of the actor cannot control the organs of his life.”

“If it comes to that, my friend, I saw Garrick’s Richard III.—But were we calm enough at that moment to serve as idle and impartial spectators? Were we in a position to be able to examine the emotional state of that man when we ourselves were overcome by our own? Besides, the decisive climax even of a deception is such an important
moment for the trickster that its anticipation can very easily produce in him symptoms as powerful as astonishment can in those being deceived. Consider also the unexpected appearance of the court officers—”

“Exactly, my lord—it is good that you remind me of them.—Would he really have dared to compromise so dangerous a plan in full view of the law? To put the loyalty of his minion to such a hazardous test? And to what purpose?”

“He must know his own people—let him take care of that. Do we know what kind of secret crimes there are that give him a hold over that man’s tongue?—You heard what office he occupies in Venice—and let this pretence, too, be ranked alongside the remaining fairy tales—what would it cost him in fact to help this fellow out, who has no other accuser than himself?”

(And, in fact, the way things fell out justified the Prince’s suspicions only too well. Some days later, on putting out enquiries regarding our prisoner, we received the answer that he had vanished.)

“And to what purpose, you ask? In what other way than by these powerful means could he have seen to it that the Sicilian was obliged to give such an improbable and outrageous confession, on which so much depended? Who, other than a desperate man with nothing more to lose could decide to give such humiliating information about himself? Under what other circumstances would we have believed what he told us?”

“I will grant everything you say, my lord,” I said at last: “that both apparitions were tricks; that this Sicilian foisted a mere fairy-tale on us that his principal had taught him; that both of them, working hand in glove, had one and
the same end in view, and that all those other miraculous accidents that astonished us in the course of this incident can be explained in the light of this partnership. Nevertheless, that prophecy in the Piazza San Marco, the first miracle that led to all the rest, remains unexplained; and what good to us is the key to all the other mysteries if the explanation of this one defeats us?”

“Turn it rather the other way round, my dear Count,” the Prince rejoined. “Tell me, what do all those miracles prove if I can show that there was just one single piece of sleight of hand behind them? That prophecy, I freely confess, is beyond my comprehension. If it stood there on its own, then the Armenian would have concluded his part as he began it—I admit I do not know how much further it might have led me. I am inclined to be somewhat suspicious of prophecies in this vulgar society.”

“That I grant you, my lord! But it still remains
inexplicable
and I call upon all our philosophers to furnish me with an explanation.”

“But is it really so incomprehensible?” the Prince continued, after reflecting for a few moments. “I am very far from claiming the name of philosopher and yet I might feel tempted to find a natural key to this miracle as well, or rather to strip it of all supernatural appearance.”

“If you can do that, my dear Prince,” I replied, giving him a very sceptical smile, “then you would be the only miracle I believed in.”

“And, as proof,” he continued, “of how little we are justified in having recourse to supernatural powers, I will show you two different ways in which we could get to the bottom of this matter without doing violence to nature.”

“Two keys at the same time! Indeed, you make me curious in the extreme.”

“You remember reading with me about the details regarding the illness of my dead cousin. It was in the course of an attack of the ague that an apoplectic fit killed him. It was the unusual nature of this death that drove me, I confess, to consult a number of doctors and what I learnt in the course of this put me on the trail of this sorcery. The illness of the dead man, one of the rarest and most uncommon, has a particular symptom, which is that, during the shivering fit, it plunges the sick man into a deep sleep from which he cannot wake and which usually kills him apoplectically on the second return of the paroxysm. Since these paroxysms return in the strictest order and at a fixed time, the doctor is therefore in a position, once he has diagnosed the nature of the disease, to state the hour of death. The third paroxysm of a three-day intermittent fever, however, takes place, as is well known, during the fifth day of the illness—and that is precisely how long it takes a letter to reach Venice from ***, where my cousin died. Now let us suppose that our Armenian has a vigilant correspondent among the retinue of the dead man,—that he has a lively interest in receiving news from there, that he has designs on me which a belief on my part in the miraculous and in the semblance of supernatural powers would help to promote -, and so you have a natural explanation for that soothsaying which seems so incomprehensible to you. Enough, you can gather from this how it is possible for a third party to give me news of a death which, at the moment when he announces it, is taking place forty miles away.”

“Indeed, my lord, you are connecting things together here which, taken separately, do in fact sound very natural but which only by means of something not far short of magic can indeed be thus connected.”

“What? Are you then less alarmed at the miraculous than at the far-fetched, the unusual? The moment we concede that the Armenian had an important plan, which either had me as its object or which was using me as its means—and are we not obliged to concede this, whatever we may think of him as a person?—then there is nothing unnatural, nothing constrained about whatever takes him to his goal by the shortest route. What shorter route is there, however, to getting someone under your control than to be credited with having miraculous powers? Who can resist a man to whom spirits are subservient? But I admit that my supposition is far-fetched—I confess that it does not satisfy even me. I do not insist on it because I do not think it worth relying on an artificial and premeditated plan or design when mere chance is quite sufficient.”

“What?” I broke in. “You are claiming that pure chance—”

“Barely more than that!” continued the Prince. “The Armenian knew about the danger my cousin was in. He met us in the Piazza San Marco. The opportunity offered itself to him to venture a prophecy which, if it failed, was merely a word gone to waste—but which, if it came true, could have the most important consequences. Success smiled on the attempt—and only now could he think of using the gift of accident to make a coherent plan.—Time will clear up this secret or perhaps not—but believe me, my friend,” (and he laid his hand on mine,
while looking at me very gravely)—“a man who commands the obedience of higher powers will be in no need of conjuring tricks, or will despise them.”

So ended a conversation which I have here fully recorded because it shows the difficulties that were to be overcome with the Prince and because, I hope, it will purge his memory of the accusations that he rushed blindly and recklessly into the snare that devilry of an unprecedented nature had prepared for him. All those—the Count of O** continues to record—who, at the moment I am writing this, may look down on his weakness with contempt, and who, in the proud conceit of their infallible reason, regard themselves as justified in condemning him,—few of those, I fear, would have endured this first trial in so manly a fashion. If, even in spite of this fortunate preparatory schooling, he is, from now on, seen to fall; if that evil conspiracy, which his good genius warned him of when it was still far off, is found nevertheless to succeed against him, then, instead of mocking at his folly, we will rather wonder at the enormity of the villainy which laid low a mind so well-defended. Worldly considerations can play no part in my testimony, since he who would thank me for it is no more. His dreadful fate has played itself out; his soul will have long ago cleansed itself at the throne of Truth, before which mine also will have long been standing when the world reads this; but—and pardon me the tears which fall unbidden in memory of my dearest friend —in the interests of justice I write it down: he was a noble man and would certainly have been a credit to the throne he tried to ascend by a criminal act, so deluded he had allowed himself to become.

N
OT LONG AFTER
these latter events—Count von O** continues to relate—I began to notice an important change in the Prince’s disposition. Until now the Prince had avoided any close examination of his faith and been content to purify the brutal and materialistic religious notions with which he had been brought up by means of the better ideas which arose in him later; this he did without examining the foundations of his faith. Religious matters altogether, he confessed to me on several occasions, had always seemed to him an enchanted castle into which one does not set foot without some trepidation; one would do far better to pass over the subject with respectful resignation, without running the danger of getting lost in its labyrinths. However, an opposing tendency drew him irresistibly to investigations that were related to it.

A sanctimonious and slavish education was the source of this aversion; it had imprinted on his tender brain nightmare shapes from which, throughout the course of his life, he could never entirely free himself. Religious melancholy was a hereditary disease in his family; the education given to him and his brothers was adapted to this disposition and the people to whom he was entrusted were selected from the same motive, being therefore either fanatics or hypocrites. To suffocate all the boy’s liveliness of spirit beneath stifling stone tablets was the most reliable means of ensuring the unalloyed contentment of the royal parents.

The whole of the Prince’s youth was marked by this dark, night-like character; joy was banished even from his games. All his ideas of religion had something terrifying about them, and it was precisely this, whatever was grisly and coarse, which first seized hold of his lively imagination and survived there longest, too. His God was a gargoyle, a vengeful Being; his reverence of God was the trembling of a slave or a blind submission that smothered all his vitality and sense of adventure. Religion stood there barring the way to all those boyish and youthful inclinations to which his sturdy body and blooming health served to make all the more explosive; it was at loggerheads with everything for which his youthful heart hankered; he came to know it never as a blessing, only as a scourge of his passions. And so a silent rancour against it gradually flared up in his heart, which, along with a reverential faith and blind fear in his head and heart, made for the strangest mixture: a repugnance for a master before whom he felt an equal degree of horror and reverence.

No wonder that he seized the first opportunity to escape from so harsh a yoke—but he fled from it like a bond slave from his cruel master, a slave who even in the midst of liberty still feels the chains about him wherever he goes. This was why—because he did not quietly and freely renounce the faith of his youth, because he had not waited until his maturer reason had slowly freed itself from its hold, because he had escaped it as a runaway over whom his master continued to exercise his proprietary rights—this was why, even after so many distractions, he was obliged to return to it again and again. He had escaped but still wore the manacles and for this reason was
doomed to become the prey of each andevery swindler who could see this and was able to use it. That such a man appeared, if the reader has not guessed already, the sequel of this history will show.

The Sicilian’s confessions had long-term consequences, affecting the Prince’s mind more importantly than this whole affair merited, and the small victory that his reason had gained over this feeble piece of trickery had noticeably increased his confidence in that same reason. The ease with which he had succeeded in seeing through the deception seemed to have surprised even himself. In his head there was not yet an exact enough demarcation between truth and error for him to avoid frequently confusing what supported the one with what supported the other; for this reason the blow that demolished his belief in the miraculous also caused the whole edifice of his religious faith to totter. In this respect he was like an inexperienced man who has been deceived in friendship or love because he made a bad choice and who now abandons faith in feeling altogether because he takes what merely appears as feeling for what its true qualities and characteristics are. The unmasking of a lie made him suspicious also of the truth because his understanding of the truth had been built unfortunately on similarly shaky foundations.

The heavier became the sense of oppression from which he only appeared to have freed himself, the more this supposed triumph pleased him. From this time on a scepticism arose in him that did not spare even what men most revere.

Several circumstances combined to keep him in this state of mind and to hold him in it even more firmly. The
solitude in which he had hitherto lived now ceased and had to give way to a life full of distractions. His rank had been discovered. Attentions he received which he was obliged to return and the etiquette which he owed to his rank, these pulled him imperceptibly into the hurly-burly of the great world. His rank as well as his personal qualities gave him entrance to the most sophisticated circles in Venice; he soon found himself rubbing shoulders with the most brilliant minds of the Republic, scholars as well as statesmen. This forced him to widen the monotonous and narrow circle in which his spirit had been confined until now. He began to be aware of the narrow-mindedness of his ideas and to feel the need for a more elevated kind of education. The old-fashioned nature of his thinking, however many fine qualities it otherwise came with, fared to his disadvantage when set alongside the prevalent notions of this society, and his unfamiliarity in the most ordinary of matters exposed him on occasions to ridicule. Nothing did he fear so much as ridicule. The unfavourable prejudice held against the land of his birth he saw as a gauntlet challenging him to disprove it in his own person. Then, added to this, was a characteristic peculiar to him whereby every attention paid him that he believed he had to thank to his rank and not his personal worth exasperated him. He felt this humiliation chiefly in the presence of people who shone intellectually and who triumphed, as it were, over their birth through their personal merits. In such society to see himself set apart as Prince was always deeply mortifying to him, because he unfortunately believed that this title excluded him immediately from all chances of competing in it. All this taken
together convinced him of the necessity of providing his mind with the education that he had thus far neglected, in order to catch up with those enlightened members of the quick-witted and rational world, who had left him so far behind. To this end he chose the most modern literature, and devoted himself to this with all the earnestness that he applied to everything he undertook. But, as his bad luck would have it, when it came to selecting these books, he always chanced sadly upon ones which did little to improve either head or heart. And here, too, his old inclinations held sway, these drawing him with irresistible fascination, as they had always done, to everything lying beyond the wit of man: it was to matters relating to this alone that he attended to and remembered; his head and his heart remained empty, those parts of his brain being filled instead with muddled ideas. The dazzling style of one captured his imagination, while the subtelty of another ensnared his reason. It became easy for both to subjugate a mind that was prey to everything that forced itself on him with a certain audacity.

A course of reading, pursued enthusiastically for over a year, enriched him with scarcely any salutary notions but rather filled his head with doubts; as he was consistent of character, it unfailingly followed that these doubts soon found their sad way to his heart. In brief, he had entered this labyrinth as a credulous zealot, and he left it as a sceptic—in the end, as an out-and-out freethinker.

Among the circles into which they managed to draw him was a certain closed society called Bucentauro, which, while appearing to foster a high-minded and rational freedom of spirit, promoted in fact unbridled
licence both in opinion and manners. Since it numbered among its members many of the clergy, and even had at its head the names of several cardinals, the Prince was all the more easily persuaded to be initiated into it. Certain dangerous truths that reason led to, so he said, could be placed in no better hands than such people’s, whose position obliged them to be moderate and who had the advantage, too, of having heard and questioned the opponents of such truths. The Prince was forgetting here that libertinism of mind and morals spreads far wider amongst persons of this rank precisely because it meets with fewer checks and is not scared off by any aura of godliness that will often dazzle the eyes of the profane. And this was the case with the Bucentauro, the majority of whose members, by means of a damnable philosophy and of the kind of morals this led to, abused not only their rank but also humanity itself.

This society had its secret degrees, and, out of respect for the Prince, I would like to believe he was never found worthy of the innermost sanctuary. Everyone who joined this society had to, for as long as he lived at least, set aside his rank, his nation, his religious affiliation, in short, all conventional distinguishing marks, and adopt a certain condition of universal equality. The election of members was strict, in fact, since only intellectual merits paved the way. The society prided itself on its exalted tone and most refined taste and it did indeed enjoy such a reputation throughout Venice. This, as well as the appearance of equality that held sway there, was an irresistible attraction for the Prince. Clever conversation enlivened with sharp wit, instructive discussions, the best from the groves of
academe and corridors of power, who here conjoined and found, as it were, a centre—for a long time all this hid from him the danger of this connection. As the true spirit of the organisation little by little became more visible to him through its mask or as it grew wearisome being on his guard against it, so beating a retreat became dangerous and both a false shame as well as a concern for his own safety forced him to hide his inner antipathy.

But simply through becoming familiar with men of this type and with their views—even though they did not charm him into imitating them—through this alone, the pure and beautiful simplicity of his character and delicacy of his moral feelings were destroyed. His intellect, built on such meagre foundations, could not solve unassisted the subtle fallacies with which they ensnared him, and imperceptibly this terrible corrosive ate away at everything, nearly everything, on which his morality was founded. The natural supports of his happiness he abandoned for sophisms, but these deserted him just at the very moment when they were needed, so forcing him to seize hold of the first best random lifelines they tossed him.

Perhaps the hand of a friend would have succeeded in pulling him back from this abyss in time— but, apart from the fact that I first learnt about the true nature of the Bucentauro long afterwards, when the evil had already been done, it was at the beginning of this period that an urgent matter called me away from Venice. My Lord Seymour, too, a valuable acquaintance of the Prince, whose cool head was proof against every kind of deceit, and who would most certainly have been able to provide
him with reliable support, also left us at this time to return to his own country. Those in whose hands I left the Prince were sincere men, certainly, but inexperienced and extremely restricted in their religion, being unaware of the evil and not having the Prince’s respect. All they could offer by way of resistance to his insidious sophisms were the dictates of a blind, unexamined faith, which either incensed or amused him; he all too easily ignored them and, his intelligence being more than a match for them, these poor defenders of a good cause were soon silenced. Those who subsequently secured his trust were far more interested in dragging him down ever deeper. When I returned to Venice the following year—how changed I found everything!

The influence of this new philosophy soon began to show in the Prince’s life. The more he visibly prospered in Venice and gained new friends, the more his older friends began to sink in his estimation. With every passing day he liked me less and we saw each other more infrequently—he was in fact around less: he had been caught up in the current of the great world. When he was at home, there was a constant stream of visitors. One amusement, one banquet, one delight followed hard on the heels of the next. He was like the belle of the ball, paid court to by all, the king and idol of every social circle. Where, in the former quiet of his restricted life, he had thought the way of the world to be difficult, now, to his astonishment he found it easy. Everything was so effortless, everything that fell from his lips was admired, and when he was silent, society felt robbed. This good fortune that followed him everywhere, this universal success, also made
him truly more than he in fact was, because it gave him courage and self-confidence. The elevated opinion which he thus gained of his own worth gave him faith in the exaggerated and almost idolatrous reverence that was paid to his intellect. Without this enlarged and, to some extent, well-founded self-esteem, he would otherwise have been bound to find it suspicious. Now, however, this universal voice only confirmed what his complacent pride whispered to him privately—it was a tribute, he believed, that was rightly his due. He certainly would have escaped this snare, if they had given him time to draw breath, if they had only granted him some quiet leisure time in which to compare his real worth with the picture held up before him in such a delightful a mirror. But his existence amounted to a continuous state of intoxication, of soaring frenzy. The higher they raised him up, the more he had to do to maintain himself at that height: this perpetual exertion slowly consumed him; peace had deserted even his sleep. They had identified his weak spots and accurately assessed the passions that they had inflamed in him.

The honest gentlemen among his retinue soon had to pay the price for the fact that their lord had become a great intellect. Serious sentiments and venerable truths which had earlier been very close to his heart now became objects of his mockery. He avenged himself on the truths of religion because of the oppression he had suffered so long on account of mad delusions; but there was an unmistakable voice in his heart which fought against the delirium of his head, so that his ribaldry contained more bitterness than jollity. His natural disposition began to
change, and moodiness set in. The most precious jewel in his character, his modesty, disappeared: flatterers had poisoned his fine heart. The gentle tact in his dealings, which had formerly made his followers quite forget he was their master, was now not infrequently replaced by an imperious and critical tone. This was all the more hurtful because it was not based on the outward disparity of birth—something which they found it easy to comfort themselves with, but to which he himself paid scant attention—but on an offensive assumption of his personal superiority. Because, when at home, he often indulged in reflections which would not have entered his mind in the whirl of society, his own people seldom saw him otherwise than gloomy, morose and unhappy, while he animated the circles he moved in outside home with a forced jollity. It pained us to watch him drifting away down this dangerous path; but in the tumult into which he was flung he no longer heard the feeble voice of friendship and was also too happy now to understand it.