Classic Audiobook Collection - A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac ~ Full Audiobook [scifi]

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac audiobook. Genre: scifi In A Voyage to the Moon, Cyrano de Bergerac launches a bold, mischievous tale that blends adventure with razor-edged satire. The narrator, a quick-witted skeptic with an appetite for daring theories, becomes obsessed with the possibility of life beyond Earth and devises a series of improbable schemes to reach the Moon. When his experiments finally hurl him into the heavens, he arrives in a world that is unmistakably alien yet uncomfortably familiar: a society with its own customs, hierarchies, and assumptions about what is natural, moral, and true. As an outsider, he is forced to justify his origin, his beliefs, and even his humanity before curious (and often hostile) lunar authorities and philosophers. Each encounter becomes a contest of ideas, where accepted wisdom is flipped on its head and earthly dogmas about religion, science, politics, and social status are tested under an unforgiving new logic. By turns comic, confrontational, and imaginative, this early classic invites listeners to question certainty itself and to wonder how strange our own world might look from far away. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 00 (00:22:06) Chapter 01 (00:24:45) Chapter 02 (00:32:18) Chapter 03 (00:37:15) Chapter 04 (00:43:12) Chapter 05 (00:56:38) Chapter 06 (01:02:15) Chapter 07 (01:08:41) Chapter 08 (01:27:31) Chapter 09 (01:41:22) Chapter 10 (01:55:48) Chapter 11 (02:16:32) Chapter 12 (02:22:30) Chapter 13 (02:36:00) Chapter 14 (02:55:15) Chapter 15 (03:05:12) Chapter 16 (03:21:43) Chapter 17 (03:34:51) Chapter 18 (03:42:11) Chapter 19 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

a voyage to the moon by sierano de bergerac chapter i of how the voyage was conceived i had been with some friends at clamor a house near paris and magnificently entertained there by monsieur de the lord of it when upon our return home about nine of the clock at night the air serene and the moon in the full the contemplation of that bright luminary furnished us with such variety of thoughts as made the way seem shorter than indeed it was. Our eyes being fixed upon that stately planet, everyone spoke what he thought of it. One would needs have it be a garret window of heaven. Another presently affirmed that it was the pan whereupon Diana smoothed Apollo's bands,

while another was of opinion that it might very well be the sun himself, who, putting his locks up under his cap at night, peeped through a hole, to observe what was doing in the world during his absence. And for my part, gentlemen, said I, that I may put in for a share and guess with the rest, not to amuse myself with those curious notions wherewith you tickle and spur on slow-paced time,

I believe that the moon is a world like ours, to which this of ours serves likewise for a moon. This was received with the gentlemen, laughter of the company and perhaps said I gentlemen just so they laugh now in the moon at some who maintained that this globe where we are is a world but I'd as good have said nothing as have alleged to them that a great many learned men had been of the same opinion for that only made them laugh the faster however this thought which because of its boldness suited my humour being confirmed

by contradiction, sunk so deep into my mind that during the rest of the way I was big with definitions of the moon which I could not be delivered of, in so much that by striving to verify this comical fancy by reasons of appearing weight, I had almost persuaded myself already of the truth on't. When a miracle, accident, providence, fortune, or what perhaps some may call vision, others fiction, whimsy, or, if you will, follow. Furnished me with an occasion that engaged me into this discourse. Being come home, I went up into my closet, where I found a book open upon the table, which I had not put there. It was a piece of Cardanus, and though I had no design to read in it, yet I fell at first sight, as by force,

exactly upon a passage of that philosopher where he tells us that studying one evening by canter, light, he perceived two tall old men enter in through the door that was shut, who, after many questions that he put to them, made him answer, that they were inhabitants of the moon, and thereupon immediately disappeared. I was so surprised not only to see a book get thither of itself, but also because of the nicking of the time so patly, and of the page at which it lay upon, that I looked upon that concatenation of accidents as a revelation. discovering to mortals that the moon is a world how said i to myself having just now talked of a thing can a book which perhaps is the only book in the world that treats of that matter so particularly fly down from the shelf upon my table become capable of reason in opening so exactly at the place of so strange an adventure force my eyes in a manner to look upon it and then to suggest to my fancy the reflections

and to my will the designs which I hatch. Without doubt, continued I, the two old men, who appeared to that famous philosopher, are the very same who have taken down my book and opened it at that page, to save themselves the labour of making me the harangue which they made to Cardin. But, added I, I cannot be resolved of this doubt unless I mount up thither.

And why not, said I instantly to myself, Prometheus heretofore went up to heaven and stole fire from thence. Have not I as much boldness as he? And why should not I then expect as favourable a success? End of Chapter 1. Section 4 of A Voyage to the Moon by Serrano de Bergerac, translated by Archibald Lubble. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Chapter 2. Of how the author set out and where he first arrived. after these sudden starts of imagination which may be termed perhaps the ravings of a violent fever i began to conceive some hopes of succeeding in so fair a voyage insomuch that to take my measures aright i shut myself up in a solitary country-house where having flattered my fancy with some means proportionated to my design at length i set out for heaven in this manner i planted myself in the middle of a great many glasses full of dew tied fast about me upon which the sun so violently darted his rays that the heat which attracted them as it does the thickest clouds carried me up so high that at length i found myself above the middle region of the air but seeing that attraction hurried me up with so much rapidity that instead of drawing near the moon as i intended she seemed to me to be more distant than at my first setting out i broke several of my vials until i found my way to exceed the force of the attraction and that i began to descend again towards the earth i was not mistaken in my opinion for some time after i fell to the ground again and to reckon from the hour that i set out at it must then have been about me Night. Nevertheless, I found the sun to be in the meridian, and that it was noon.

I leave it to you to judge, in what amazement I was. The truth is, I was so strangely surprised that not knowing what to think of that miracle, I had the insolence to imagine that in favour of my boldness, God had once more nailed the sun to the firmament, to light so generous an enterprise. That which increased my astonishment was that I, I knew not the country where I was. It seemed to me that having mounted straight up, I should have fallen down again in the same place I parted from.

However, in the equipage I was in, I directed my course towards a kind of cottage where I perceived some smoke, and I was not above a pistol shot from it when I saw myself environed by a great number of people stark naked. They seemed to be exceedingly surprised at the sight of me. for i was the first as i think that they had ever seen clad in bottles nay and to baffle all the interpretations that they could put upon that equipage they perceived that i hardly touched the ground as i walked for indeed they understood not that upon the least agitation i gave my body the heat of the beams of the noon sun raised me up with my dew and that if i had had vials enough about me it would possibly have carried me up into the air in their view i had a mind to have spoken to them but as if fear had changed them into birds immediately i lost sight of them in an adjoining forest

however i catched hold of one whose legs had without doubt betrayed his heart i asked him but with a great deal of pain for i was quite choked how far they reckoned from thence to paris how long men had gone naked in france and why they fled from me in so great consternation the man i spoke to was an old tawny fellow who presently fell at my feet and with lifted up hands joined behind his head opened his mouth and shut his eyes he mumbled a long while between his teeth but i could not distinguish an articulate word so that i took his language for the mafling noise of a dumb man some time after i saw a company of some time after i saw a company of some company of some soldiers marching, with drums beating, and I perceived two detached from the rest, to come and take speech of me. When they were come within hearing, I asked them where I was. You are in France, answered they. But what devil hath put you into that dress? And how comes it that we know you not? Is the fleet then arrived? Are you going to carry the news of it to the governor. And why have you divided your brandy into so many bottles? To all this I made answer,

that the devil had not put me into that dress, that they knew me not, because they could not know all men, that I knew nothing of the sends carrying ships to Paris, that I had no news for the Marshal de l'Opital, and that I was not loaded with brandy. Oh, said they to me, taking me by the arm, you are a merry fellow indeed come the governor will make a shift to know you no doubt on't they led me to their company where i learnt that i was in reality in france but that it was in new france so that sometime after i was presented before the governor who asked me my country my name and quality and after that i had satisfied him in all points and told him the pleasant success of my voyage whether he believed it or only pretended to do so he had the goodness to order me me a chamber in his apartment. I was very happy in meeting with a man capable of lofty opinions, and who was not at all surprised when I told him that the earth must needs have turned during my elevation. Seeing that having begun to mount about two leagues from Paris, I was fallen,

as it were, by a perpendicular line in Canada. End of Chapter 2. Section 5 of a voyage to the moon by Cirano de Bergerac, translated by Archibald Lovell. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3 Of his conversation with the Viceroy of New France And of the system of this universe. When I was going to bed at night, He came into my chamber and spoke to me to this purpose.

I should not have come to disturb your rest, Had I not thought that one who hath found out the secret of travelling so far in twelve hours' space and likewise a charm against lassitude. But you know not, added he, what a pleasant quarrel I have just now had with our fathers upon your account. They'll have you absolutely to be a magician, and the greatest favour you can expect from them is to be reckoned only an imposter.

The truth is, that motion which you attribute to the earth is a pretty nice paradox, and for my part I'll frankly tell you that that which hinders me from being of your opinion, is that though you parted yesterday from Paris, yet you might have arrived today in this country without the earth's turning. For the sun having drawn you up by the means of your bottles, ought he not to have brought you hither, since according to Ptolemy, and the modern philosophers, he marches obliquely, as you make the earth to move. And besides, what great probability have you to imagine that the sun is immovable when we see it go? And what? What is it is,

And what appearance is there that the earth turns with so great rapidity when we feel it firm under our feet? Sir, replied I to him, these are in a manner the reasons that oblige us to think so. In the first place, it is consonant to common sense to think that the sun is placed in the centre of the universe. Seeing all bodies in nature standing in need of that radical heat, it is fit he should reside in the heart of the kingdom, that he may be in a condition readily to supply the necessities of every part, and that the cause of generations should be placed in the middle of all bodies, that it may act there with greater equality and ease. After the same manner as wise nature hath placed the seeds in the centre of apples, the kernels in the middle of their fruits, and in the same manner as the onion, under the cover of so many

coats that encompass it, preserves that precious bud from which millions of others are to have their being. For an apple is in itself a little universe. The seed, hotter than the other parts thereof, is its sun, which diffuses about itself that natural heat which preserves its globe. And in the onion, the germ is the little sun of that little world, which vivifies and nourishes the vegetative salt of that little mass. Having laid down this, then, for a ground, I say, that the earth standing in need of the light, heat, and influence of this great fire, it turns round it, that it may receive in all parts alike,

that virtue which keeps it in being. For it would be as ridiculous to think that that vast luminous body turned about a point that it has not the least need of, as to imagine that when we see a roasted lark, that the kitchen fire must have turned round it. Else were it the part of the sun to do that drudgeon, it would seem that the physician stood in need of the patient,

that the strong should yield to the weak, the superior serve the inferior, and that the ship did not sail about the land, but the land about the ship. Now, if you cannot easily conceive how so ponderous a body can move, pray tell me, are the stars and heavens, which, in your opinion, are so solid, any way lighter?

Besides, it is not so difficult for us, for us who are assured of the roundness of the earth to infer its motion from its figure but why do ye suppose the heaven to be round seeing you cannot know it and that yet if it hath not this figure it is impossible it can move i object not to you your eccentrics nor epicycles which you cannot explain but very confusedly and which are out of doors in my system let's reflect only on the natural causes of that motion to make good good your hypothesis you are forced to have recourse to spirits or intelligences that move and govern your spheres but for my part without disturbing the repose of the supreme being who without

doubt hath made nature entirely perfect and whose wisdom ought so to have completed her that being perfect in one thing she should not have been defective in another i say that the beams and influences of the sun darting circularly upon the earth make it to turn to turn to turn to as with a turn of the hand we make a globe to move or which is much the same that the steams which continually evaporate from that side of it which the sun shines upon being reverberated by the cold of the middle region rebound upon it and striking obliquely do of necessity make it whirl about in that manner the explication of the other motions is less perplexed still for pray consider a little but these words the viceroy interrupted me I had rather, said he, you would excuse yourself from that trouble, for I have read some books of Gascendos on that subject. And hear what one of our fathers, who maintained your opinion one day, answered me. Really, said he, I fancy that the earth does move, not for the reasons alleged by Copernicus, but because hellfire, being shut up in the centre of the earth, the damned who make a great bustle to avoid its flames,

scramble up to the vault as far as they can from them, and so make the earth to turn, as a turn-spit makes the wheel go round when he runs about in it. We applauded that thought, as being a pure effect of the zeal of that good father. And then the viceroy told me that he much wondered, how the system of Ptolemy being so improbable, should have been so universally received. Sir, said I to him, most part of men who judge of all things by the senses, have suffered themselves to be persuaded by their eyes. And as he who sails along ashore

thinks the ship immovable and the land in motion, even so, men turning with the earth round the sun have thought that it was the sun that moved about them. To this may be added the unsupportable pride of mankind, who persuade themselves that nature hath only been made for them. As if it were likely that the sun, a vast body 434 times bigger than the earth, had only been kindled to ripen their medlars and plumpin their cabbage.

For my part, I am so far from complying with their insolence that I believe the planets are worlds about the sun, and that the fixed stars are also suns which have planets about them, that's to say, worlds which, because of their smallness, and that their borrowed light cannot reach us, are not discernible by men in this world. for in good earnest how can it be imagined that such spacious globes are no more but vast deserts and that ours because we live in it hath been framed for the habitation of a dozen of proud dandy prats how must it be said because the sun measures our days and years that it hath only been made to keep us from running our heads against the walls no no if that visible deity shine upon man it's by accident as the king's

flamboy by accident lightens a porter that walks along the street. But, said he to me, if, as you affirm, the fixed stars be so many suns, it will follow that the world is infinite. Seeing it is probable that the people of that world which moves about that fixed star you take for a sun, discover above themselves other fixed stars, which we cannot perceive from hence, and so others in that manner in infinitum. never question replied I but as God could create the sole immortal he could also make the world infinite if so it be that eternity is nothing else but an illimited duration and an infinite a boundless extension and then God himself would be finite supposing the world not to be infinite seeing he cannot be where nothing is and that he could not increase the greatness of the world without adding somewhat to his own being by beginning to exist where he did not exist before

we must believe then that as from hence we see saturn and jupiter if we were in either of the two we should discover a great many worlds which we perceive not and that the universe extends so in infinitum if faith replied he when you have said all you can i cannot at all comprehend that infinitude good now replied i to him do you comprehend the nothing that is beyond it not at all for when you think of that nothing you imagine it at least to be like wind or air and that is a being but if you conceive not an infinite in general you comprehend it at least in particulars seeing it is not difficult to fancy to ourselves beyond the earth air and fire which we see other air and other earth and other fire. Now, infinitude is nothing else but a boundless series of all these. But if you ask me how these worlds have been made, seeing Holy Scripture speaks only of one that God made, my answer is that I have no more to say,

for to oblige me to give a reason for everything that comes into my imagination is to stop my mouth and make me confess that in things of that nature my reason, shall always stoop to faith. He ingeniously acknowledged to me that his question was to be censured, but bid me pursue my notion, so that I went on,

and told him that all the other worlds, which are not seen, or but imperfectly believed, are no more but the scum that purges out of the suns. For how could these great fires subsist without some matter that served them for fuel? Now, as the fire drives from it,

the ashes that would stifle it, or the gold in a crucible separates from marquisite and dross, and is refined to the highest standard. Nay, and as our stomach discharges itself by vomit of the crudities that oppress it. Even so these sons daily evacuate and reject the remains of matter that might incommode their fire. But when they have wholly consumed that matter which entertains them, you are not to doubt, but they spread themselves abroad on all sides to seek for fresh fuel. and fasten upon the worlds which heretofore they have made, and particularly upon those that are nearest. Then these great fires, reconcocting all the bodies, will as formerly force them out again,

pell-mell from all parts, and being by little and little purified, they'll begin to serve for sons to other little worlds, which they procreate by driving them out of their spheres. And that, without doubt, made the Pythagorean's foretell the universal conflagration. This is no ridiculous imagination, for New France where we are, gives us a very convincing instance of it. The vast continent of America is one half of the earth, which in spite of our predecessors, who a thousand times had cruised the ocean, was not at that time discovered. Nor indeed was it then in being, no more than a great many islands, peninsular,

and mountains that have since started up in our globe, when the sun purged out its excrements to a convenient distance and of a sufficient gravity to be attracted by the centre of our world, either in small particles, perhaps, or it may be also altogether in one lump. That is not so unreasonable, but that Saint-Ostein would have applauded to it if that country had been discovered in his age.

Seeing that great man, who had a very clear wit, assures us that in his time the earth was flat like the floor of an oven and that it floated upon the water like the half of an orange but if ever i have the honor to see you in france i'll make you observe by means of a most excellent celloscope that some obscurities which from hence appear to be spots our worlds are forming my eyes that shut with this discourse obliged the viceroy to withdraw end of chapter three section six of a voyage to the moon by sirano de bergerac translated by archibald lovel this librivox recording is in the public domain chapter four of how at last he set out again for the moon though without his own will next day and the days following we had some discourses to the same purpose but some time after since the hurry of affairs suspended our philosophy i fell afresh upon the design of mounting up to the moon. So soon as she was up, I walked about musing in the woods, how I might manage and succeed in my enterprise, and at length on St. John's Eve, when they were at council in the fort,

whether they should assist the wild natives of the country against the Iroquians. I went all alone to the top of a little hill at the back of our habitation, where I put in practice what you shall hear. I had made a machine which I fancied might carry me up as high as I please, so that nothing seeming to be wanting to it, I placed myself within, and from the top of a rock threw myself in the air. But because I had not taken my measures aright, I fell with a soche in the valley below.

Bruised as I was, however, I returned to my chamber without losing courage, and with beef marrow I anointed my body, for I was all over-mortified from head to foot. Then having taken a dram of cordial waters, to strengthen my heart. I went back to look for my machine. But I could not find it for some soldiers that had been sent into the forest to cut wood for a bonfire. Meeting with it by chance, had carried it with them to the fort. Whereafter a great deal of guessing what it might be, when

they had discovered the invention of the spring, some said that a good many fireworks should be fastened to it because their force carrying them up on high, and the machine playing its large wings, no body but would take it for a fiery dragon in the meantime i was long in search of it but found it at length in the market-place of quebec just as they were setting fire to it i was so transported with grief to find the work of my hands in so great peril that i ran to the soldier that was giving fire to it caught hold of his arm plucked the match out of his hand and in great rage threw myself into my machine that i might undo the fire that they had stuck about it. But I came too late, for hardly were both my feet within, when, whip, away went I up in a cloud. The horror and consternation I was in

did not so confound the faculties of my soul, but I have since remembered all that happened to me at that instant. For so soon as the flame had devoured one tear of squibs, which were ranked by six and six, by means of a train that reached every half-dozen, another tear went off, and then another, so that the saltpeter taking fire put off the danger by increasing it however all the combustible matter being spent there was a period put to the fire-work and whilst i thought of nothing less than to knock my head against the top of some mountain i felt without the least stirring my elevation continuing and adieu machine for i saw it fall down again towards the earth that extraordinary adventure puffed up my heart with so uncommon a gladness

that ravished to see myself delivered from certain danger, I had the impudence to philosophize upon it. Whilst then with eyes and thought, I cast about to find what might be the cause of it, I perceived my flesh blown up and still greasy with the marrow that I had daubed myself over with for the bruises of my fall.

I knew that the moon being then in the wane, and that it being usual for her in that quarter to suck up the marrow of animals, she drank up that wherewith I was anointed, with so much the more force, that her globe was nearer to me, and that no interposition of clouds weakened her attraction. When I had, according to the computation I made since,

advanced a good deal more than three quarters of the space that divided the earth from the moon, all of a sudden I fell with my heels up and head down, though I had made no trip. And indeed, I had not been sensible of it, had I not felt my head loaded under the weight, of my body. The truth is I knew very well that I was not falling again towards our world, for though I found myself to be betwixt two moons, and easily observed that the nearer I drew to the

one, the farther I removed from the other, yet I was certain that ours was the bigger globe of the two, because after one or two days' journey, the remote refractions of the sun, confounding the diversity of bodies and climates, it appeared to me only as a large plate of gold. that made me imagine that i biased towards the moon and i was confirmed in that opinion when i began to call to mind that i did not fall till i was past three-quarters of the way for said i to myself that mass being less than ours the sphere of its activity must be of less extent also and by consequence it was later before i felt the force of its centre end of chapter four section seven of a voyage to the moon by syrano de bergeron translated by archibald lovel this librovoc's recording is in the public domain chapter five of his arrival there and of the beauty of that country in which he fell in fine after i had been a very long while in falling as i judged for the violence of my precipitation hindered me from observing it more exactly the last thing i can remember is that i found myself under a tree entangled with three or four pretty large branches which i had broken off by my fall and my face besmeared with an apple that had dashed against it by good luck that place was as you shall know by and by that you may very well conclude that had it not been for that chance if i had had a thousand lives they had been all lost

i have many times since reflected upon the vulgar opinion that if one precipitate himself from a very high place his breath is out before he reach the ground and from my adventure i concluded to be false or else that the efficacious juice of that fruit which squirted into my mouth must needs have recalled my soul that was not far from my carcass which was still hot and in a disposition of exerting the functions of life the truth is so soon as i was upon the ground my pain was gone before i could think what it was and the hunger which i felt during my voyage was fully satisfied with the sense that i had lost it when i was got up i had hardly taken notice of the largest of four great rivers which by their conflux make a lake when the spirit or invisible soul of plants that breathe upon that country refreshed my brain with a delightful smell and i found that the stones there were neither hard nor rough but that they carefully softened themselves when one trod upon them i presently lighted upon a walk with five avenues in figure like to a star the trees whereof seemed to reach up to the sky a green plot of lofty boughs casting up my eyes from the root to the top and then making the same survey downwards i was in doubt whether the earth carried them or they the earth hanging by their roots their high and stately forehead seemed also to bend as it were by force under the weight of the celestial globes and one would say that their sighs and outstretched arms wherewith they embraced the firmament demanded of the stars the bounty of their purer influences before they had lost anything of their innocence in the contagious bed of the elements the flowers there on all hands without the aid of any other gardener but nature

send out so sweet though wild a perfume that it rouses and delights the smell there the incarnate of a rose upon the bush and the lively asia of a violet under the rushers captivating the choice make each of themselves to be judged the fairest there the whole year is spring there no poisonous plant sprouts forth but is as soon destroyed there the brooks by an agreeable murmuring relate their travels to the pebbles. There thousands of queristers make the woods resound with their melodious notes, and the quavering clubs of these divine musicians are so universal that every leaf of the forest seems to have borrowed the tongue and shape of a nightingale. Nay, and the nymph echo is so delightful with their airs that to hear her repeat one would say she were solicitous to learn them. On the sides of that wood are two meadows, whose continued verdure seems an emerald reaching out of sight. The various colours which the spring bestows upon the

numerous little flowers that grow there so delightfully confound and mingles their shadows, that it is hard to be known whether these flowers shaken with a gentle breeze pursue themselves or fly rather from the caresses of the wanton zephyrus. One would likewise take that meadow for an ocean, because, as the sea, it presents no shore to the view, insomuch that my eye fearing it might lose itself having roamed so long and discovered no coast sent my thoughts presently thither and my thoughts imagining it to be the end of the world were willing to be persuaded that such charming places had perhaps forced the heavens to descend and join the earth there in the midst of that vast and pleasant carpet a rustic fountain bubbles up in silver pearls crowning its enameled banks with sets of violets and multitudes of other little flowers that seem to strive which shall first behold itself in that crystal mirroir. It is as yet in the cradle, being but newly born, and its young and smooth face shows

not the least wrinkle. The large compasses it fetches, encircling within itself, demonstrate its unwillingness to leave its native soil, and as if it had been ashamed to be caressed in presence of its mother, with a murmuring it thrust back my hand that would have touched it. the beasts that came to drink there more rational than those of our world seemed surprised to see it day upon the horizon whilst the sun was with the antipodes and durst not bend downwards upon the brink for fear of falling into the firmament i must confess to you that at the sight of so many fine things i found myself tickled with these agreeable twitches which they say the embryo feels upon the infusion of its soul my old hair fell off and gave place for thicker and softer locks i perceived my youth revived my face grow ruddy my natural heat mingle gently again with my radical moisture and in a word i grew younger again by at least fourteen years end of chapter five section eight of a voyage to the moon by syrano de bergerac translated by archibald lovell this librovoc's recording is in the public domain chapter six of a youth whom he met there and of their conversation what that country was and the

inhabitants of it i had advanced half a league through a forest of jessamines and myrtles when i perceived something that stirred lying in the shade it was a youth whose majestic beauty forced me almost to adoration he started up to hinder me crying it is not to me but to god that you owe these humilities. You see one, answered I, stunned with so many wonders that I know not what to admire most, for coming from a world which, without doubt, you take for a moon here, I thought I had arrived in another, which our worldlings call a moon also, and behold, I am in paradise at the feet of a God who will not be adored. Except the quality of a God, replied he, whose creature i only am the rest you say is true this land is the moon which you see from your globe and this place where you are is

now at that time man's imagination was so strong as not being as yet corrupted neither by debauchers the crudity of elements nor the alterations of diseases that being excited by a violent desire of coming to this sanctuary and his body becoming light through the heat of this inspiration. He was carried thither in the same manner as some philosophers who, having fixed their imagination upon the contemplation of a certain object, have sprung up in the air by ravishments, which you call ecstasies. The woman, who through the infirmity of her sex was weaker and less hot, could not, without doubt, have the imagination strong enough to make the intention of her will prevail over the ponderousness of her matter. But because there were very few the sympathy which still united that half to its whole drew her towards him as he mounted up as the amber attracts the straw as the lodestone turns towards the north from whence it hath been taken and drew to himself

that part of himself as the sea draws the rivers which proceed from it when they arrived in your earth they dwelt betwixt mesopotamia and arabia some people knew them by the name of, and others under that of Prometheus, whom the poets feigned to have stolen fire from heaven, by reason of his offspring, who were endowed with a soul as perfect as his own. So that to inhabit your world, that man left this destitute. But the all-wise would not have so blessed an habitation to remain without inhabitants. He suffered a few ages after that. Cloed with the company of men, whose innocence was corrupted, had a desire to forsake them. This person, however, thought no retreat secure enough from the ambition of men,

who already murdered one another about the distribution of your world, except that blessed land which his grandfather had so often mentioned unto him, and to which no body had as yet found out the way. But his imagination supplied that, for seeing he had, observed that he filled two large vessels which he sealed hermetically and fastened them under his armpits so soon as the smoke began to rise upwards and could not pierce through the metal it forced up the vessels on high and with them also that great man when he was got as high as the moon and had cast his eyes upon that lovely garden a

fit of almost supernatural joy convinced him that that was the place where his grandfather had here to for-lived. He quickly untied the vessels, which he had girt-like wings about his shoulders, and did it so luckily that he was scarcely four-fathom in the air above the moon, when he set his fins are going. Yet he was high enough still to have been hurt by the fall, had it not been for the large skirts of his gown, which being swelled by the wind gently upheld him till he set foot on ground. As for the two veld, they mounted up to a certain place where they have continued, and those are they which nowadays you call the balance.

I must now tell you the manner how I came hither. I believe you have not forgot my name, seeing it is not long since I told it you. You shall know, then, that I lived on the agreeable banks of one of the most renowned rivers of your world, where amongst my books I led a life pleasant enough not to be lamented, though it slipped away fast enough. In the meanwhile, the more I increased in knowledge,

the more I knew my ignorance. Our learned men never put me in mind of the famous Mada, but the thoughts of his perfect philosophy made me to sigh. I was despairing of being able to attain to it, when one day, after a long and profound studying, I took a piece of lodestone about two-foot square, which I put into a furnace, and then after it was well purged, precipitated and dissolved, I drew the calcined attractive of it,

and reduced it into the size of about an ordinary bowl. After the preparations I got a very light machine of iron made, into which I went, and when I was well seated in my place, I threw this magnetic bowl as high as I could up into the air. Now the iron machine, which I had purposely made more massive in the middle than at the ends, was presently elevated and in a just poise, because the middle received the greatest force of attraction. So then, as I arrived at the place whether my lodestone had attracted me,

I presently threw up my bowl in the air over me. But, said I, interrupting him, how came you to heave up your bowl so straight over your chariot that it never happened to be on one side of it? That seems to me to be no wonder at all, said he, for the loadstone being once thrown up in the air drew the iron straight towards it and so it was impossible that ever I should mount sideways

nay more I can tell you that when I held the bowl in my hand I was still mounting upwards because the chariot flew always to the loadstone which I held over it but the effort of the iron to be united to my bowl was so violent that it made my body bend double so that I durst put once essay that new experiment

The truth is, it was a very surprising spectacle to behold, for the steel of that flying house, which I had very carefully polished, reflected on all sides the light of the sun with so great life and luster, that I thought myself to be all on fire. In fine, after often bowling and following of my cast, I came, as you did, to an elevation from which I descended towards this world, and because at that instant I held my bowl very fast between my hands, my machine, whereof the seat, pressed me hard,

that it might approach its attractive, did not forsake me. All that now I feared was that I should break my neck. But to save me from that, ever now and then I tossed up my bowl, that by its attractive virtue it might prevent the violent descent of my machine and render my fall more easy, as indeed it happened. For when I saw myself within two or three hundred, fathom of the earth. I threw out my bowl on all hands, level with the chariot, sometimes on this side, and sometimes on that, until I came to a certain distance, and immediately then I tossed it up

above me. So that my machine following it, I left it, and let myself fall on the other side, as gently as I could, upon the sand, insomuch that my fall was no greater than if it had been but my own height. I shall not describe to you the amazement I was in at the sight of the wonders of this place, seeing it was so like the same, wherewith I just now saw you seized. You shall know then that on the morrow I met with the tree of life, by the means of which I have kept myself from growing old. It straightway consumed the serpent and made him to vanish away in smoke. At these words, venerable and holy patriarch, said I to him, I am eager to know what you understand by that serpent which was consumed. He, with face a smiling, answered me thus.

The tree of knowledge is planted opposite. Its fruit is covered with a rind which produces ignorance in whomsoever hath tasted thereof. Yet this rind preserves underneath its thickness all the spiritual virtues of this learned food. God, when he had driven Adam from this fortunate country, rubbed his gums with this same rind, that he might never find the way back again. For more than fifteen years thereafter he did dote, and did so completely forget all things, that neither he nor any of his descendants till Moses ever remembered even so much as the creation. But what power was left of this direful rind at last passed away through the warmth and brightness of that great prophet's genius.

I happily met with one among these apples, which through ripeness was despoiled of its skin. Hardly had my mouth watered with it, when universal knowledge penetrated my being. I felt, as it were, an infinite number of eyes fixed themselves in my head, and I knew the means of speaking with the Lord. When I have since reflected on these miraculous events, I have judged that I could in no wise have overcome by any occult powers of a simple natural body, the vigilance of that seraph whom God has ordained to guard this paradise. But since he pleased to use second causes, I imagined that he had inspired me to find this means of entering there, even as he thought good to take of the ribs of Adam to make him a wife, though he could

form her of earth as well as he did Adam. I remained long in this garden, walking about alone. But in fine, since the angel that was the keeper of the gate seemed to me to be in chief my host here, I was taken with the desire to salute him. In an hour's journey I came to a place where a thousand and lightnings mingled together in one blinding light that served but to make darkness visible. I was not yet fully recovered from this dazzlement when I saw before me a beautiful young man. I am, said he, the archangel whom you seek. I have but now read in God that he had inspired you with the means of coming here, and that he willed you should here expect his pleasure. He talked with me of many things and told me among the rest. that the light wherewith i had been amazed was nothing fearful but that it appeared almost every evening when he went his rounds seeing that to avoid sudden attack from the evil spirits which may enter secretly at any place he was constrained mightily to swing his flaming sword in circles all about the bounds of the earthly paradise

and that the light I had seen was the lightnings which the steel of it gave forth. Those also which you perceive from your earth, he added, are of my creation. And if sometimes you see them at a great distance, it is because the clouds of some distant region hold themselves in such disposition as to receive an impression of these unbodied fires and reflect them to your eyes. Just as clouds otherwise disposed may prove themselves fit to make the rainbow. I will not instruct you further in these matters, since to be sure the apple of knowledge is not far from hence,

whereas as soon as you have eaten, you will know all things even as I. But see you make no mistake, for most of the fruits that hang from that plant are encased in a rind, whose taste will abase you even below man, while the part within will make you mount up to be even as the angels. Elijah had come to this point of the teachings of the seraph when a little short man came up with us. "'This is that Enoch of whom I told you,' said my guide to me apart. And even while he finished the words,

Enoch offered to us a basketful of I know not what fruits, like to pomegranates, which he had but discovered that same day in a distant coppice. I took some and put in my pockets, as Elijah bade me. Hereupon Enoch asked him who I might be. That is a matter, answered my guide, to entertain us at more leisure. this evening when we have withdrawn he shall tell us himself of the miraculous particulars of his journey with these words we arrived beneath a sort of hermitage made of palm branches skilfully interlaced with myrtle and orange branches there i saw in a little nook great piles of a kind of floss silk so white and so delicate that one might take it for the virgin soul of the snow and i saw distaffs lying here and there whereupon i asked my guide what use there

served. To spin, he answered me, when the good Enoch would relax his mind from meditation, he applies himself sometimes to dressing this lady distaff, sometimes to weaving the cloth from which they make shifts for the eleven thousand virgins. Surely in your world you have met with that something white which flutters on the winds in autumn about the season of the winter sewings. Your peasant folk call it our lady's cotton, but it is no other than the flock that Enoch purges his dinanov when he cards it we made little delay there and but barely took leave of enoch whom this cabin served for his cell in truth what made us leave him so soon was this that he said some prayer there every six hours and it was at least that time since he had finished the last one As we went forward, I begged Elijah to finish that history which he had begun, of the assumptions or translations,

and I said that he had come, I thought, to that of St. John the Evangelist. Then said he to me, Since you have not the patience to wait till the apple of knowledge teach you all these things better than I can, I will even tell you. Know then that God... At this word, in some way I know not how, the devil would have his finger in that pie, or howsoever it came about. So it was that I could not forbear interrupting him with raillery.

I remember that case, said I. God heard one day that the soul of the evangelist was so loosed from his body, that he no more kept it in but by shutting his teeth hard, and at that moment the hour when he had foreseen that he should be translated hither was almost past. So having no time to get him a machine-made ready for coming, He was constrained to make him suddenly be here without having time to bring him. During all my discourse, Elijah bent upon me such a look, as would have been fit to kill me, had I then been capable of dying from aught but hunger.

Thou wretch, said he, and drew back in horror. Thou hast the insolence to rail at holy things. Surely thou shouldst not go unpunished, were it not that the all-wise determines to spare thee as a marvelous example of his long-suffering, a witness to the nations. Get hence, thou blasphemer, go thou and publish in this little world, and in the other, for thou art predestined to return thither, the unforgetting hatred that God bears to atheists. Hardly had he finished this curse when he seized me roughly to drag me toward the gate. when we were arrived beside a great tree

whose branches bent almost to earth with the burden of their fruit Here, said he, is that tree of knowledge where thou shouldst have got enlightenment inconceivable, but for thy infidelity. At that word I feigned to swoon with weakness,

and letting myself fall against a low branch, I handily filched an apple from it. And in but a few strides more I was set down outside of that delicious garden. in that moment being so violently pressed by hunger that I even forgot I was in the grip of the angry prophet. I drew from my pocket one of those apples I had filled it with, wherein I buried my teeth as deep as I could. But so it was that in place of taking one of those Enoch had given me, my hand fell on that very apple I had plucked from the tree of knowledge,

which for my misfortune I had not freed of its rind. Scarcely had I tasted it when a thick cloud. overcast my soul. I saw no body now near me, and in the whole hemisphere my eyes could not discern the least tract of the way I had made. Yet nevertheless I fully remembered everything that befell me. When I reflected since upon that miracle, I fancied that the skin of the fruit which I bit had not rendered me altogether brutish. Because my teeth piercing through it were a little moistened by the juice within. The efficacy whereof had dissipated the malignities of the rind. I was not a little surprised to see myself all alone,

in a country I knew not. It was to no purpose for me to stare and look about me, for no creature appeared to comfort me. End of Chapter 6. Section 9 of a voyage to the moon by Serrano de Bergerac, translated by Archibald Lovell. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. chapter seven being cast out from that country of the new adventures which befell him and of the demon of socrates at length i resolved to march forwards till fortune should afford me the company of some beasts or at least

she favourably granted my desire for within half a quarter of a league i met two huge animals one of which stopped before me and the other fled swiftly to its den because that sometimes sometimes time after I perceived it come back again in the company of above seven or eight hundred of the same kind who beset me. When I could discern them at a near distance, I perceived that they were proportioned and this adventure brought into my mind the old wives' tales of my nurse concerning sirens, ferns, and satyrs. Ever now and then they raised such furious shouts, occasioned undoubtedly by their admiration at the sight of me, that I thought I was in turned a monster. At length one of these beast-like men, catching hold of me by the neck,

just as wolves do when they carry away sheep, tossed me upon his back and brought me into their town, where I was more amazed than before, when I knew there were men, that I could meet with none of them but who marched upon all four. When these people saw that I was so little, for most of them are twelve cubits long,

and that I walked only upon two legs, they could not believe me to be a man for they were of opinion that nature having given to men as well as beasts two legs and two arms they should both make use of them alike and indeed reflecting upon that since that situation of the body did not seem to me altogether extravagant when i called to mind that whilst children are still under the nurture of nature they go upon all four and that they rise not on their two legs but by the care of their nurses who set them in little running-chairs and fasten straps to them, to hinder them from falling on all four, as the only posture that the shape of our body naturally inclines to rest in. They said then, as I had it interpreted to me since, that I was infallibly the female of the Queen's little animal, and therefore, as such, or somewhat else,

I was carried straight to the townhouse, where I observed by the muttering and gestures both of the people and magistrates, that they were consulting what sort of a thing I could be. when they had conferred together a long while a certain burgher who had the keeping of the strange beasts besought the mayor and alderman to commit me to his custody till the queen should send for me to couple me to my mail this was granted without any difficulty and that juggler carried me to his house where he taught me to tumble vault make mouths and show a hundred odd tricks for which in the afternoons he received money at the door from those that came in to see me but heaven pitying my sorrows and vexed to see the temple of its maker profaned so ordered it that one day when i was tied to a rope wherewith the mountebank made me leap and skip to divert the people I heard a man's voice who asked me what I was in Greek. I was much surprised to hear one speak in that country as they do in our world.

He put some questions to me, which I answered, and then gave him a full account of my whole design and the success of my travels. He took the pains to comfort me, and as I take it, said to me, Well, son, at length you suffer for the frailties of your world. There is a mobile here, as well as there. that can sway with nothing but what they are accustomed to. But know that you are but justly served, for had any one of this earth had the boldness to mount up to yours

and call himself a man, your sages would have destroyed him as a monster. He then told me that he would acquaint the court with my disaster, adding that so soon as he had heard the news that went of me, he came to see me, and was satisfied that I was a man of the world of which I said I was, because he had travelled there formerly and sojourned in Greece, where he was called the Demon of Socrates,

that after the death of that philosopher, he had governed and taught Ipanondas at Thebes. After which being gone over to the Romans, Justice had obliged him to espouse the party of the younger Cato, that after his death he had addicted himself to Brutus, that all these great men, having left in that world no more but the shadow of their virtues, He with his companions had retreated to temples and solitudes. In a word, added he,

The people of your world became so dull and stupid that my companions and I lost all the pleasure that formerly we had in instructing them. Not but that you have heard men talk of us, for they called us oracles, nymphs, geniuses, fairies, household gods, lemms, lars, lemmies, hobgoblins, Nayadis, incubuses, shades, manes, visions, and apparitions. We abandoned your world in the reign of Augustus, not long after I had appeared to Drusus the son of Libya, who waged war in Germany, whom I forbid to proceed any father.

It is not long since I came from thence a second time. Within these hundred years I had a commission to travel thither. I roamed a great deal in Europe and conversed with some whom possibly you may have known. One day, amongst others, I appeared to Cardin, as he was at his study. I taught him a great many things, and he in acknowledgement promised me to inform posterity of whom he had those wonders, which he intended to leave in writing. There I saw Agrippa, the Abbot Trithemius, Dr. Faustus, Labros, Caesar, and a certain cabal of young men who are commonly called Rosicrucians, or Knights of the Red Cross,

whom I taught a great many knacks and secrets of nature, which without doubt have made them pass for great magicians. I knew Campanella also. It was I that advised him, whilst he was in the Inquisition at Rome, to put his face and body into the usual postures of those who's inside he needed to know, that by the same frame of body he might excite in himself the thoughts which the same situation had raised in his adversaries, because by so doing he might better manage their soul when he came to know it,

and at my desire he began a book which we entitled desensurreru i likewise haunted in france la motte de la viella and gascendos this last hath written as much like a philosopher as the other lived i have known a great many more there whom your age called divines but all that i could find in them was a great deal of babble and a great deal of pride in fine since i passed over from your country into england to acquaint myself with the manners of its inhabitants I met with a man the shame of his country, for certainly it is a great shame for the grandees of your states to know the virtue which in him has its throne, and not to adore him. That I may give you an abridgment of his panegyric, he is all wit, all heart, and possesses all the qualities of which one alone was here-to-for sufficient to make an hero. It was Tristan the hermit. The truth is, I must tell you, when I perceived so exalted of the world of you, when I perceived so

exalted a virtue I mistrusted it would not be taken notice of, and therefore I endeavored to make him accept three vials, the first filled with the oil of talk, the other with the powder of projection, and the third with aorumpotabille. But he refused them, with a more generous disdain than Diogenes did the compliments of Alexander. In fine, I can add nothing to the elegy of that great man, but that he is the only poet, the only philosopher, and the only free man amongst you. These are the considerable persons that I conversed with. All the rest, at least that I know, are so far below man that I have seen beasts somewhat above them.

After all, I am not a native neither of this country nor yours. I was born in the sun. But because sometimes our world is overstocked with people, by reason of the long lives of the inhabitants, and that there is hardly any wars or diseases amongst them, Our magistrates from time to time send colonies into the neighbouring worlds. For my own part I was commanded to go to yours, being declared chief of the colony that accompanied me.

I came since into this world for the reasons I told you, and that which makes me continue here is, because the men are great lovers of truth, and have no pedants among them, that the philosophers are never persuaded but by reason, and that the authority of a doctor or of a doctor, a great number is not preferred before the opinion of a thresher in a barn when he has right on his side. In short, none are reckoned madmen in this country but sophisters and orators.

I asked him how they lived. He made answer three or four thousand years, and thus went on, Though the inhabitants of the sun be not so numerous of those of this world, yet the sun is many times overstocked because the people being of a hot constitution are stirring and ambitious and digest much. You ought not to be surprised at what I tell you, for though our globe be very vast and yours little, though we die not before the end of four thousand years and you at the end of fifty, yet know that as there are not so many stones as clods of earth, nor so many animals as plants, nor so many men as beasts. Just so there ought not to be so many spirits as men, by reason of the difficulties that occur in the generation of a perfect creature.

I asked him if they were bodies as we are. He made answer that they were bodies, but not like us, nor anything else which we judged such, because we call nothing a body commonly but what we can touch, that in short there was nothing in nature but what was material, and that though they themselves were so, yet they were forced when they had a mind to appear to us, to take bodies proportionated to what our senses are able to know. And that without doubt, that was the reason why many have taken the stories that are told of them for the delusions of a weak fancy, because they only appeared in the night-time. He told me with all that seeing they were necessitated to piece together the bodies they were to make use of, in great haste, many times

they had not leisure enough to render them the objects of more senses than one at a time. Sometimes of the hearing, as the voices of oracles, sometimes of the sight, as the fires and visions, sometimes of the feeling, as the incubuses, and that these bodies being but air condensed in such or such a manner, the light dispersed them by its heat in the same manner as it scatters a mist. So many fine things as he told me gave me the curiosity to question him about his birth and death. if in the country of the sun the individual was procreated by the ways of generation and if it died by the dissolution of its constitution or the discomposure of its organs

your senses replied he bear but too little proportion to the explication of these mysteries ye gentlemen imagine that whatsoever you cannot comprehend is spiritual or that it is not at all but that consequence is absurd and it is an argument that there are a million of things, perhaps, in the universe, that would require a million of different organs in you to understand them. For instance, I, by my senses, know the cause of the sympathy that is betwixt the lodestone and the pole, of the ebbing and flowing of the sea, and what becomes of the animal after death. You cannot reach these high conceptions, but by faith, because they are secrets above the power of your intellects. No more than a blind man can judge of the beauties of a landscape, the colors of a picture, or the streaks of a rainbow. Or at best he will fancy them to be somewhat palpable,

to be like eating, a sound, or a pleasant smell. Even so should I attempt to explain to you what I perceive by the senses which you want. You would represent it to yourself as somewhat that may be heard, seen, felt, smelt, or tasted, and yet it is no such thing. He was gone on so far in his discourse when my juggler perceived that the company began to be weary of my gibberish that they understood not, and which they took to be an inarticulated grunting. He therefore fell to pulling my rope afresh to make me leap and skip,

till the spectators, having had their bellyfuls of laughing, affirmed that I had almost as much wit as the beasts of their country, and so broke up. End of Chapter 7. Section 10 of A Voyage to the Moon by Sirano de Bergerac, translated by Archibald Lovell. this Librevox recording is in the public domain chapter eight of the languages of the people in the moon of the manner of feeding there and paying the scot and of how the author was taken to court thus all the comfort i had during the misery of my hard usage were the visits of this officious spirit for you may judge what conversation i could have with these that came to see me since besides that they only took me for an animal in the highest class of the category of brutes

I neither understood their language nor they mine. For you must know that there are but two idioms in use in that country, one for the grandees, and another for the people in general. That of the great ones is no more but various inarticulate tones, much like to our music when the words are not added to the air. And in reality it is an invention both very useful and pleasant. For when they are weary of talking or disdain to prostitute their throats to that office, they take either a lute or some other instrument,

whereby they communicate their thoughts as well as by their tongue, so that sometimes 15 or 20 in a company will handle a point of divinity or discuss the difficulties of a lawsuit in the most harmonious consort that ever tickled the ear. The second, which is used by the vulgar, is performed by a shivering of the members, but not perhaps as you may imagine. For some parts of the body signify an entire discourse.

For example, the agitation of a finger, a hand, an ear, a lip, an arm, an eye, a cheek. Everyone severally will make up an or a period with all the parts of it. Others serve only instead of words, as the knitting of the brows, the several quivering of the muscles, the turning of the hands, the stamping of the feet, the contortion of the arm, so that when they speak, as their custom is stark naked, their members being in the used to gesticulate their conceptions, moved so quick that one would not think it to be a man that spoke, but a body that trembled. Every day, almost, the spirit came to see me, and his rare conversation made me patiently bear with the rigor of my captivity. At length one morning I saw a man

enter my cabin, whom I knew not, who, having a long while licked me gently, took me in his teeth by the shoulder, and with one of his paws, wherewith he held me up for fear I might hurt myself, threw me upon his back, where I found myself so softly seated, and so much at my ease, that, though being afflicted to be used like a beast, I had not the least a desire of making my escape. And besides, these men that go upon all four are much swifter than we, seeing the heaviest of them make nothing of running down a stag. In the meantime, I was extremely troubled. that I had no news of my courteous spirit. And the first night we came to our inn,

as I was walking in the court, expecting till supper should be ready, a pretty handsome young man came smiling in my face and cast his two forelegs about my neck. After I had a little considered him, How, said he in French, do you not know your friend then? I leave you to judge in what case I was at that time.

Really, my surprise was so great that I began to imagine that all the globe of the moon, all that had befallen me, and all that I had seen, had only been enchantment. And that beast man, who was the same that had carried me all day,

continued to speak to me in this manner. You promised me that the good officers I did you should never be forgotten, and yet it seems you have never seen me before. But perceiving me still in a maze, in fine, said he, I am that same demon of Socrates, who diverted you during your imprisonment and who that i may still oblige you took to myself a body on which i carried you to-day but said i interrupting him how can that be seeing that all day you were of a very long stature and now you were very short

that all day long you had a weak and broken voice and now you have a clear and vigorous one that in short all day long you were a gray-headed old man and are now a brisk young blade. Is it then that whereas in my country the progress is from life to death? Animals here go retrograde from death to life, and by growing old become young again. As soon as I had spoken to the prince, said he, and received orders to bring you to court, I went and found you out where you were, and have brought you hither. But the body I acted in was so tired out with the journey that all its organs refused me their ordinary functions, so that I inquired the way to the hospital. Where being come in I found the body of a young man,

just then expired by a very odd accident, but yet very common in this country. I drew near him, pretending to find emotion in him still, and protesting to those who were present, that he was not dead, and that what they thought to be the cause of his death was no more but a bare lethargy, so that without being perceived I put my mouth to his

by which I entered as with a breath. then down-dropped my old carcass and as if i had been that young man i rose and came to look for you leaving the spectators crying a miracle with this they came to call us to supper and i followed my guide into a parlour richly furnished but where i found nothing fit to be eaten no victuals appearing when i was ready to die of hunger made me ask him where the cloth was laid but i could not hear what he answered for at that instant three or four young boys children of the house drew near and with much civility stripped me to the shirt this new ceremony so astonished me that i durst not ask my pretty valet's de chamber the cause of it and i cannot tell how my guide who asked me what i would begin with could draw from me these two words a potage but hardly had i pronounced them when i smelt the odor of the most agreeable soup that ever steamed in the rich glutton's nose I was about to rise from my place That I might trace that delicious scent to its source But my carrier hindered me

Whither are you going? said he We shall fetch a walk by and by But now it is time to eat Make an end of your potage And then we'll have something else And where the devil is the potage Answered I half angry Have you laid a wager you'll jeer me all this day?

I thought, replied he That at the town we came from You had seen your master or somebody else at meal, and that's the reason I told you not, how people feed in this country. Seeing then you are still ignorant, you must know that here they live on steams. The art of cookery is to shut up in great vessels, made on purpose, the exhalations that proceed from the meat whilst it is addressing, and when they have provided enough of several sorts and several tastes, according to the appetite of those they treat, they open one vessel where that steam is kept and after that another and so on till the company be satisfied unless you have already lived after this manner you would never think that the nose without teeth and gullet can perform the office of the mouth in feeding a man but i'll make you experience it yourself

he had no sooner said so but i found so many agreeable and nourishing vapours enter the parlour one after another that in less than half a quarter of an hour i was fully satisfied when we were got up this is not a matter said he much to be admired at seeing you cannot have lived so long and not have observed that all sorts of cooks who eat less than people of another calling are nevertheless much fatter whence proceeds that plumpness do you think unless it be from the steams that continually environ them which penetrate into their bodies and fatten them hence it is that the people of this world enjoy a more steady and vigorous health by reason that their food hardly engenders any excrements, which are in a manner the original of all diseases. You were perhaps surprised that before supper you were stripped, since it is a custom not practised in your country. But it is the fashion of this, and for this end used, that the animal may be the more transpirable to the fumes. Sir, answered I, there is a great deal of probability in what you say, and I have found somewhat of it myself by experience.

But I must frankly tell you that not being able to unbrute myself so soon, I should be glad to feel something that my teeth might fix upon. He promised I should, but not before next day. Because, said he, to eat so soon after your meal would breed crudities. After we had discoursed a little longer, we went up to a chamber to take our rest. A man met us on the top of the stairs, who, having attentively eyed us, led me into a closet where the floor was strode with orange flowers three-foot thick, and my spirit into another filled with gilly flowers and jessamins. Perceiving me amazed at that magnificence, he told me that there were beds of the country. In fine, we laid ourselves down to rest in our several cells, and so soon as I had stretched

myself out upon my flowers, by the light of thirty large glow-worms shut up in a crystal, being the only candles Karon uses. I perceived the three or four boys who had stripped me before supper, one tickling my feet, another my thahas, the third my flanks, and the fourth my arms,

and all so delicately and daintily, that in less than in a minute I was fast asleep. Next morning, by sunrising, my spirit came into my room and said to me, Now I'll be as good as my word, you shall breakfast this morning more solidly than you supped last night.

with that i got up and he led me by the hand to a place at the back of the garden where one of the children of the house stayed for us with a piece in his hand much like to one of our firelocks he asked my guide if i would have a dozen of larks because baboons one of which he took me to be loved to feed on them i had hardly answered yes when the fowler discharged a shot and twenty or thirty larks fell at our feet ready roasted this thought i presently with myself verifies the proverb in our world of a country where larks fall ready roasted without doubt it has been made by somebody that came from hence fall to fall too said my spirit don't spare for they have a knack of mingling a certain composition with their powder and shot which kills plucks roasts and seasons the fowl all at once i took up some of them and ate them upon his word and to say the truth in all my lifetime i never ate anything so delicious having thus breakfasted we prepared to be gone and with a thousand odd faces which they use when they would show their love our landlord received a paper from my spirit i asked him if it was a note for the reckoning he replied no that all was paid and that it was a copy of verses how verses said i are your innkeepers here curious of rhyme then it's said he the money of the country and the charge we have been at here hath been computed to amount to three couplets or six verses which i have given him i did not fear we should outrun the constable for though we should pamper ourselves for a whole week we could not spend a sonnet and i have four about me besides two epigrams two odes and an eclogue would to god said i it was so in our world for i know a good many honest poets there who are ready to-golds to starve, and who might live plentifully if that money would pass in payment.

My father asked him if these verses would always serve if one transcribed them. He made answer, No, and so went on, When an author has composed any, he carries them to the mint, where the sworn poets of the kingdom sit in court. There these versifying officers essay the pieces, and if they be judged Sterling, they are rated not according to their coin. That's to say, that a sonnet is not always as good as a sonnet, but according to the intrinsic value of the

peace, so that if anyone's staff he must be a blockhead, for men of wit make always good cheer. With ecstasy I was admiring the judicious policy of that country when he proceeded in this manner. There are others who keep public-house after a far different manner. When one is about to be gone, they demand proportionably to the charges and acquittance for the other world and when that is given them they write down in a great register which they called doomsday's book much after this manner item the value of so many verses delivered such a day to such a person which he is to pay upon the receipt of this acquittance out of his readiest cash and when they find themselves

in danger of death they cause these registers to be chopped in pieces and swallow them down because they believe that if they were not thus digested they would be good for nothing this conversation was no hindrance to our journey for my four-legged porter jogged on under me and irid straddling on his back i shall not be particular in relating to you all the adventures that happened to us on our way till we arrived at length at the town where the king holds his residence end of chapter eight section eleven of a voyage to the moon by sierano de bergerac translated by archibald lovell this librovoc's recording is in the public domain. Chapter 9. Of the little Spaniard whom he met there, and of his quaint wit, of vacuum, specific weights, and sundry other philosophical matters. I was no sooner come, but they carried me to the palace, where the grandees received me

with more moderation than the people had done as I passed the streets, but both great and small concluded that without doubt I was the female of the Queen's little animal. My guide was my interpreter, and yet he himself understood not the riddle, and knew not what to make of that little animal of the queens. But we were soon satisfied as to that, for the king having some time considered me, ordered it to be brought, and about half an hour after I saw a company of apes, wearing ruffs and breeches, come in, and amongst them a little man,

almost of my own built, for he went on two legs, so soon as he perceived me he accosted me with a criado de vests or a merced i answered his greeting much in the same terms but alas no sooner had they seen us talk together but they believed their conjecture to be true and so indeed it seemed for he of all the bystanders that passed the most favourable judgment upon us protested that our conversation was a chattering we kept for joy at our meeting again that little man told me that he was an european a native of old castile that he had found a means by the help of birds to mount up to the world of the moon where then we were that falling into the queen's hands she had taken him for a monkey because fate would have it so that in that country they clothe apes in a spanish dress and that upon his arrival being found in that habit she had made no doubt but he was of the same kind it could not otherwise be replied i but having tried all fashions of apparel upon them none were found so ridiculous and by consequence more becoming a kind of animals which are only entertained for pleasure and diversion that shows you little understand the dignity of our nation answered he for whom the universe breeds men only to be our slaves, and nature produces nothing but objects of mirth and laughter. He then entreated me to tell him how I durst be so bold as to scale the moon with the machine I told him of.

I answered that it was because he had carried away the birds, which I intended to have made use of. He smiled at this raillery, and about a quarter of an hour after, the king commanded the keeper of the monkeys to carry us back. the king's pleasure was punctually obeyed, at which I was very glad for the satisfaction I had of having a mate to converse with during the solitude of my brutification. One day my male, for I was taken for the female, told me that the true reason which it obliged him to travel all over the earth and at length to abandon it for the moon,

was that he could not find so much as one country where even imagination was at liberty. Look ye, said he, how the wittiest thing you can say, unless you wear a cornered cap, if it thwart the principles of the doctors of the robe, you are an idiot, a fool, and something worse, perhaps. I was about to have been put into the Inquisition at home from maintaining to the pedant's teeth, that there was a vacuum, and that I knew no one matter in the world more ponderous than another. I asked him what probable arguments he had to confirm so new an opinion. to evince that answered he you must suppose that there is but one element for though we see water earth air and fire distinct yet are they never found to be so perfectly pure but that there still remains some mixture for example when you behold fire it is not fire but air much extended the air is but water much dilated water is but liquefied earth and the earth itself but condensed water but

water and thus if you weigh matter seriously you'll find it is but one which like an excellent comedian here below acts all parts in all sorts of dresses otherwise we must admit as many elements as there are kinds of bodies and if you ask me why fire burns and water cools since it is but one and the same matter i answer that that matter acts by sympathy according to the disposition it is in at the time when it acts Fire, which is nothing but earth also, more dilated than is fit for the constitution of air, strives to change into itself by sympathy whatever it meets with. Thus the heat of coals, being the most subtle fire and most proper to penetrate a body, at first slides through the pores of our skin. And because it is a new matter that fills us, it makes us exhale in sweat. That sweat dilated by the fire is converted to a steam and becomes air.

that air being further rarefied by the heat of the antiparistasis or of the neighbouring stars is called fire and the earth abandoned by the cold and humidity which were ligaments to the whole falls to the ground water on the other hand though it no ways differ from the matter of fire but in that it is closer burns us not because that being dense by sympathy it closes up the bodies it meets with and the cold we feel is no more but the effect of our flesh contracting itself, because of the vicinity of earth or water, which constrains it to a resemblance. Hence it is that those who are troubled with a dropsy convert all their nourishment into water, and the choleric convert all the blood

that is formed in their liver into cholera. It being then supposed that there is but one element. It is most certain that all bodies, according to their several qualities, incline equally towards the centre of the earth. But you'll ask me, why then does iron, metal, earth and wood descend more swiftly to the centre than a sponge,

if it be not that it is full of air which naturally tends upwards? That is not at all the reason, and thus I make it out. Though a rock fall with greater rapidity than a feather, both of them have the same inclination for the journey. But a cannon bullet, for instance, where the earth pierced through, would precipitate with greater haste to the centre thereof than a bladder full of wind, and the reason is, because that mass of metal is a great deal of

earth contracted into a little space, and that wind of very little earth in a large space. For all the parts of matter, being so closely joined together in the iron, increased their force by their union, because being thus compacted, they are many that fight against a few, seeing a parcel of air equal to the bullet in bigness is not equal in quantity not to insist on a long deduction of arguments to prove this tell me in good earnest how a pike a sword or a dagger wounds us if it be not because the steel being a matter wherein the parts are more continuous and more closely knit together than your flesh is whose paws and softness show that it contains but very little matter within a great extent of place and that the point of the steel that pricks us being almost an innumerable number of particles of matter against a very little flesh. It forces it to yield to the stronger, in the same manner as a squadron in close order, will easily break through a more open battalion.

For why does a bit of red-hot iron burn more than a log of wood all on fire? Unless it be that in the iron there is more fire in a small space, seeing it adheres to all the parts of the metal, than in the wood, which being very spongy by concerted, contains a great deal of vacuity, and that vacuity, being but a privation of being, cannot receive the form of fire. But you'll object, you suppose a vacuum, as if you had proved it, and that's begging of the question.

Well, then I'll prove it. And though that difficulty be the sister of the Gordian not, yet my arms are strong enough to become its Alexander. Let that vulgar beast, then, who does not think itself a man, had it not been told so, answer me if it can. Suppose now there be but one matter, as I think I have sufficiently proved, whence comes it, that according to its appetite it enlarges or contracts itself? Whence is it that a piece of earth by being condensed becomes a stone? Is it that the parts of that stone are placed one with another in such a manner that wherever that grain of sand is

settled, even there, or in the same point, another grain of sand is lodged? That cannot be, no, not according to their own principles, seeing there is no penetration of bodies. But that matter must have crowded together, and, if you will, abridged itself, so that it hath filled some place which was empty before. To say that it is incomprehensible that there should be nothing in the world, that we are in part made up of nothing. Why not, pray, is not the whole world wrapped up in nothing? Since you yield me this point, then confess ingeniously that it's as rational that the world should have a nothing within it as nothing about it. I well perceive you'll put the question to me why water compressed in a vessel by the frost should break it, if it be not to hinder a vacuity. But I answer that that only happens because the air overhead, which as well as earth and water tends to the centre,

meeting with an empty ton by the way, takes tip his lodging there. If it find the paws of that vessel, that's to say, the ways that lead to that void place, too narrow, too long, and too crooked, with impatience it breaks through and arrives at its ton. But not to trifle away time, in answering all their objections, I dare be bold to say that if there were no vacuity, there could be no motion, or else a penetration of bodies must be admitted. for it would be a little too ridiculous to think that when a gnat pushes back a parcel of air with its wings that parcel drives another before it and that other another still and that so the stirring of the little toe of a flea should raise a bunch upon the back of the universe when they are at a stand they have recourse to rarifaction but in good earnest how can it be when a body is rarefied that one particle of the mass does recede from another particle without a

leaving an empty space betwixt them must not the two bodies which are just separated have been at the same time in the same place of this and that's so they must have all three penetrated each other i expect you'll ask me why through a reed a syringe or a pump water is forced to ascend contrary to its inclination to which i answer that that's by violence and that it is not the fear of evocuity that turns it out of the right way. But that being linked to the air by an imperceptible chain, it rises when the air to which it has joined is rarefied. That's no such knotty difficulty, when one knows the perfect circle and the delicate concatenation of the elements. For if you attentively consider the slime which joins the earth and water together in marriage, you'll find that it is neither earth nor water, but the mediator betwixt these two enemies. In the same manner, the water and air reciprocally send a mist that dives into the humours of both to negotiate a peace

betwixt them, and the air is reconciled to the fire by means of an interposing exhalation, which unites them. I believe he would have proceeded in his discourse had they not brought us our victuals, and seeing we were a hungry, I stopped my ears to his discourse and opened my stomach to the food they gave us. I remember another time, when we were upon our philosophy, for neither of us took pleasure to discourse of mean things. I am vexed, said he, to see a wit of your stamp infected with the errors of the vulgar. You must know, then, in spite of the pedantry of Aristotle, with which your schools in France still ring, that everything is in everything. That's to say, for instance, that in the water there's

is fire, in the fire-water, in the air-ear-ear-the-ear. Though that opinion makes scholars open their eyes as big as sources, yet it is easier to prove it than persuade it. For I ask them, in the first place, if water does not breed filth. If they deny it, let them dig a pit, fill it with mere element. And to prevent all blind objections, let them, if they please, strain it through a strainer, and I'll oblige myself in case they find no filth therein within a certain time to to drink up all the water they have poured into it.

But if they find filth, as I make no doubt on't, it is a convincing argument that there is both salt and fire there. Consequentially now, to find water in fire, I take it to be no difficult task. For let them choose fire, even that which is most abstracted from matter, as comets are, there is a great deal in them still, seeing if that unctuous humour whereof they are engendered, being reduced to a sulphur by the heat of the antiparistasis which kindles them did not find a curb of its violence in the humid cold that qualifies and resists it it would spend itself in a trice like lightning now that there is air in the earth they will not deny it

or otherwise they have never heard of the terrible earthquakes that have so often shaken the mountains of sicily besides the earth is full of pores even to the least grains of sand that compose it nevertheless no man hath as yet said that these hollows were filled with vacuity it will not be taken amiss then i hope if the air takes up its quarters there it remains to be proved that there is earth in the air but i think it's scarcely worth my pains seeing you are convinced of it as often as you see such numberless legions of atoms fall upon your heads as even stifle arithmetic but let us pass from simple to compound body they'll furnish me with much more frequent subjects, and to demonstrate that all things are in all things, not that they change into one another as your peripatetics juggle. For I will maintain to their teeth that the principles mingle, separate, and mingle again in such a manner, that that hath been made water by the wise creator of the world will always be water. I shall suppose no maxim as they do, but what I prove. And therefore take a billet,

or any other combustible stuff, and set fire to it. They'll say, when it is in a flame, that what was wood is now become fire, but I maintain the contrary, and that there is no more fire in it when it is all in flame than before it was kindled. But that which before was hid in the billet, and by the humidity and cold hindered from acting,

being now assisted by the stranger, hath rallied its forces against the phlegm that choked it, and commanding the field of battle, that was possessed by its enemy, triumphs over his jailer and appears without fetters. Don't you see how the water flees out at the two ends of the billet, hot and smoking from the fight it was engaged in? That flame which you see rise on high is the pure of fire, unpested from the matter,

and by consequence the readiest to return home to itself. Nevertheless, it unites itself by tapering into a pyramid till it rise to a certain height, that it may pierce through the thick humidity of the air which resists it. But as mounting, it disengaged itself by little and little from the violent company of its landlords. So it diffuses itself, because then it meets with nothing that thwarts its passage. Which negligence, though, is many times the cause of a second captivity?

For marching stragglingly, it wanders sometimes into a cloud. And if it meets there with a party of its own sufficient to make head against a vapour, They engage, grumble, thunder and roar, And the death of innocence is many times the effect of the animated rage Of those inanimated things. If, when it finds itself pestered among those crudities of the middle region, It is not strong enough to make a defence, It yields to its enemy upon discretion,

Which by its weight constrains it to fall again to the earth. And this wretch, enclosed in a drop of rain, May perhaps fall at the foot of an oak, whose animal fire will invite the poor straggler to take a lodging with him, and thus you have it in the same condition again as it was a few days before. But let us trace the fortune of the other elements that composed that billet. The air retreats to its own quarters also, though blended with vapours, because the fire, all in a rage, drove them briskly out pell-mell together.

Now you have it serving the winds for a tennis ball, furnishing breath to animals, filling up the vacuities that nature hath left, and it may be also wrapped up in a drop of dew, suckling the thirsty leaves of that tree whither our fire retreated. The water, driven from its throne by the flame, being by the heat elevated to the nursery of the meteors, will distill again in rain upon our oak, as soon as upon another, and the earth being turned to ashes,

and then cured of its sterility, either by the nourishing heat of a dunhill on which it hath been thrown, or by the vegetative salt of some neighbouring plants, or by the teeming waters of some rivers, may happen also to be near this oak, which by the heat of its germ will attract it, and convert it into a part of its bulk. In this manner, these four elements undergo the same destiny

and return to the same state, which they quitted but a few days before, so that it may be said that all that's not, necessary for the composition of a tree is in a man, and in a tree all that's necessary for making of a man. In fine, according to this way, all things will be found in all things. But we want a Prometheus to pluck us out of the bosom of nature and render us sensible, which I am willing to call the first matter. These were the things, I think, with which we passed the time, for that little Spaniard had a quaint wit. Our conversation, however, was only in the night.

time because from six o'clock in the morning until night crowds of the people that came to stare at us in our lodging would have disturbed us for some threw us stones others nuts and others grass there was no talk but of the king's beasts we had our victuals daily at set hours i cannot tell whether it was that i minded their gestures and tones more than my mail did but i learned sooner than he to understand their language and to smatter a little to smatter a little bit more than he to smatter a little bit more than he to smatter a little bit more than he to smatter a little bit more than he to smatter a little to little of it, which made us to be looked upon in another guess manner than formerly, and the news thereupon flew presently all over the kingdom that two wild men had been found, who were less than other men, by reason of the bad food we had had had in the deserts, and who, through a defect of their parents' seed, had not the forelegs strong enough to support their bodies? End of Chapter 9. Section 12 of a voyage to the moon by Cirano de Bergerac, translated by Archibald Lovell. This Librovoc's recording is in the public domain. Chapter 10, where the author comes in doubt whether he be a man, an ape, or an estridge,

and of the opinion of the lunar philosophers concerning Aristotle. This belief would have taken rooting by being spread, had it not been for the learned men of the country who opposed it, saying that it was horrid impiety to believe not only beasts, but monsters to be of their kind. It would be far more probable. added the karma sort, that our domestic beasts should participate of the privilege of humanity and by consequence of immortality, as being bred in our country, than a monstrous beast that talks of being born I know not where, in the moon, and then observe the difference betwixt us and them. We walk upon four feet because God would not trust so precious a thing

upon weaker supporters, and he was afraid, least marching otherwise, some mischance might befall man. And therefore he took the pains to rest him upon four pillars, that he might not fall, but disdaining to have a hand in the fabric of these two brutes, he left them to the caprice of nature, who not concerning herself with the loss of so small a matter supported them only by two feet. Birds themselves, said they, have not had so hard measure as they, for they have got feathers at least to supply the weakness of their legs, and to cast themselves in the when we pursue them, whereas nature depriving these monsters of two legs hath disabled them from escaping our justice. Besides, consider a little how they have the head raised toward heaven.

It is because God would punish them with scarcity of all things that he hath so placed them, for that supplicant posture shows that they complain to heaven of him that created them, and that they beg permission to make their best of our leavings. But we, on the contrary, have the head bending downwards, to behold the blessings whereof we are the masters, and as if there were nothing in heaven that our happy condition needed envy. I heard such discourses, or the like, daily at my lodge, and at length they so curbed the minds of the people as to that point, that it was decreed, that at best I should only pass for a parrot without feathers. For they confirmed those who were already persuaded, in that I had but two legs no more than a bird, which was the cause that I was put into a cage by express orders from the privy-cathes. counsel. There the Queen's bird-keeper, taking the pains daily to teach me to whistle, as they do

stares or singing-birds here, I was really happy in that I wanted not food. In the meanwhile, with the sonnets the spectators stunned me with, I learned to speak as they did, so that when I was got to be so much master of the idiom as to express most of my thoughts, I told them the finest of my conceits. The quaintness of my sayings was already the entertainment of all societies, and my wit was so much esteemed that the council was obliged to publish an edict, forbidding all people to believe that I was endowed with reason, with express commands to all persons of what quality or condition soever, not to imagine but that whatever I did, though never so witterly,

proceeded only from instinct. Nevertheless, the decision of what I was divided the town into two factions. The party that stood for me increased daily, and at length, in spite of the anathema, whereby they endeavored to scare the multitude, they who held for me demanded a convention of the states for determining that controversy. It was long before they could agree in the choice of those who should have a vote, but the arbitrators pacified the heat by making the number of both parties equal, who ordered that I should be brought under the assembly as I was.

But I was treated there with all imaginable severity. My examiners, amongst other things, put questions of philosophy to me, i ingenuously told them all that my tutor had here to foretaught me but they easily refuted me by more convincing arguments so that having nothing to answer for myself my last refuge was to principles of aristotle which stood me in as little stead as his sophisms did for in two words they let me see the falsity of them that same aristotle said they whose learning you bragged so much of did without doubt accommodate principles to his philosophy instead of accommodating his philosophy to principles, and besides, he ought to have proved them at least to be more rational than those of the other sects you mentioned to us. Wherefore the good man will not take it ill, we hope, if we bid him God B.W. In fine, when they perceived that I did nothing but ball, that they were not more knowing

than Aristotle, and that I was forbid to dispute against those who denied his principles, they all unanimously concluded that I was not a man, but perhaps a kind of estrich, seeing I carried my head upright like them, that I walked on two legs, and that in short, but for a little down, I was every way like one of them, so that the bird-keeper was ordered to have me back to my cage. I spent my time pretty pleasantly there, for because I had correctly learnt their language, the whole court took pleasure to make me prattle. The queen's maids, among the rest, slipped always some boon into my basket, and the gentlest of them all, having conceived some kindness for me, was so transported with joy, when in private I entertained her with the manners and

divertisements of the people of our world, and especially our bells and other instruments of music, that she protested to me with tears in her eyes that if ever I found myself in a condition to fly back again to our world, she would follow me with all her heart. End of Chapter 10. Section 13 of A Voyage to the Moon by Cirano de Bergerac, translated by Archibault Lovell. recording is in the public domain chapter 11 of the manner of making war in the moon and of how the moon is not the moon nor the earth the earth one morning early having started out of my sleep I found her taboring upon the greats of my cage take good heart said

she to me yesterday in council a war was resolved upon against the king I hope that during the hurry of preparations whilst our monarch and his subjects are absent. I may find an occasion to make your escape. How, a war, said I interrupting her. Have the princess of this world then any quarrels amongst themselves, as those of ours have? Good now. Let me know their way of fighting. When the arbitrators, replied she, who are freely chosen by the two parties, have appointed the time for raising forces for their march, the number of combatants, the day and place of battle, and all with so great equality that there is not one man more in one army than in the other.

All the maimed soldiers on the one side are lifted in one company, and when they come to engage, the marechal de Kahn take care to expose them to the maimed of the other side. The giants are matched with colossus, the fences with those that can handle their weapons, the valiant with the start, the weak with the infirm, the sick with the indisposed, the sturdy with the strong. And if any undertake to strike at another than the enemy he has matched with, unless he can make it out that it was by mistake, he is condemned for a coward. When the battle is over, they take an account of the wounded, the dead and the prisoners, for runaways they have none, and if the loss be equal on both sides, they draw cuts,

who shall be proclaimed victorious. But though a kingdom hath defeated the enemy in open war, yet there is hardly anything got by it, for there are other smaller armies of learned and witty men on whose disputations the triumph or servitude of states wholly depends one learned man grapples with another one wit with another and one judicious man with another judicious man now the triumph which a state gains in this manner is reckoned as good as three victories by open force after the proclamation of victory the assembly is broken up and the victorious people either choose the enemy's king to be theirs or confirm their own i could not for bear to laugh at this scrupulous way of giving battle. And for an example of much stronger politics, I alleged the customs of our Europe, where the monarch would be sure not to let slip any favourable occasion of gaining the day. But mind what she said as to that. Tell me, pray, if your princes use not a pretext of right when they levy arms.

No doubt, answered I, and of the justice of their cause, too. Why then, replied she, do they not choose impartial and unsuspected arbitrators to compose their differences. And if it be found that the one has as much right as the other, let things continue as they were, or let them play a game at Pickett for the town or province that's in dispute. But why all these circumstances replied I, in your way of fighting? Is it not enough that both armies are equal in the number of men? Your judgment is weak, answered she. Would you think in conscience that if you had the better of your enemy, hand to hand, in an open field, you had fairly overcome him, if you had had on a coat of

mail and he none, if he had had but a dagger, and you a tuck, and in a word, if he had had but one arm, and you both yours? Nevertheless, what equality soever you may recommend to your gladiators, they never fight on even terms, for the one will be a tall man, and the other short, the one skillful at his weapon, and the other a man that never handled a sword. The one will be strong and the other weak, and though these disproportion's were not, but that the one were as skillful and strong as the other, yet still they might not be rightly matched, for one perhaps may have more courage than the other, who being rash and hot-headed, incoerned in danger, as not foreseeing it. Of abelious temper, a more contracted heart, with all the qualities

that constitute courage, as if that as well as a sword were not a weapon which his adversary hath not. He makes nothing of falling desperately upon terrifying and killing this poor man, who foresees the danger, who has his heat choked in phlegm, and a heart too wide to close in the spirits in such a posture as is necessary for thawing that ice which is called cowardice. And now you praise that man for having killed his enemy at odds, and praising him for his boldness, you praise him for a sin against nature. Seeing such boldness tends to its destruction. And this puts me in mind to tell ye that some years ago application was made to the council of war for a more circumspect and conscientious rule to be made as to the way of fighting. The philosopher who gave

the advice, if I mistake it not, spake in this manner. You imagine, gentlemen, that you have very equally balanced the advantages of two enemies, when you have chosen both tall men, both skillful and both courageous. But that's not enough. Seeing after all the conqueror must have the better on either through his skill, strength, or good fortune. If it be by skill, without doubt, he hath taken his adversary on the blind side, which he did not expect, or struck him sooner than was likely, or feigning to make his pass on one side he hath attacked him on the other. Nevertheless, all this is cunning, cheating, and treachery, and none of these make a brave man. If he hath triumphed by force, would you judge his enemy overcome, because he hath been

overpowered? No. Doubtless, no more than you'll say that a man hath lost the victory, when overwhelmed by a mountain, it was not in his power to gain it. Even so, the other was not overcome, because he was not in a suitable disposition, at that nick of time to resist the violences of his adversary. If chance hath given him the better of his enemy, fortune ought then to be crowned, since he hath contributed nothing to it. And in fine, the vanquished is no more to be blamed than he who at dice having thrown seventeen is beat by another that throws three sixes they confessed he was in the right but that it was impossible according to humane appearances to remedy it and that it was better to submit to a small

inconvenience than to open a door to a hundred of greater importance she entertained me no longer at that time because she was afraid to be found alone with me so early not that impudicity is a crime in that country on the contrary except malefactors convicted, all men have power over all women, and in the same manner a woman may bring her action against a man for refusing her. But she durst not keep me company publicly, because the members of counsel at their last meeting had said that it was chiefly the women who gave it out that I was a man,

which was the reason that for a long time I neither saw her nor any other of her sex. In the meantime, some must needs have revived the disputes about the definition of my being, for whilst I was thinking of nothing else but of dying in my cage, I was once more brought out to have another audience. I was then questioned in presence of a great many courtiers upon some points of natural philosophy. And as I take it, my answers gave some kind of satisfaction. For the president declared to me at large his thoughts concerning the structure of the world.

They seemed to me very ingenious. And had he not traced it to its original, which he maintained to be eternal, I should have thought his philosophy more rational than our own. But as soon as I heard him maintain a foppery, so contrary to our faith, I broke with him, at which he did but laugh, and that obliged me to tell him that since they were thereabouts with it, I began again to think that their world was but a moon. But then all cried,

Don't you see here earth, rivers, seas? What's all that, then? No matter, said I. Aristotle assures us it is but a man. moon. And if you had said the contrary in the schools where I have been bred, you would have been hissed at. At this they all burst out in laughter. You need not ask if it was their ignorance that made them do so, for in the meantime I was carried back to my cage. But some more passionate doctors, being informed that I had the boldness to affirm that the moon from whence I

came was a world, and that their world was no more but a moon, thought it might give them a very just pretext to have me condemned to the water, for that's their way of rooting out heretics. For that end, they went in a body and complained to the king who promised them justice, and ordered me once more to be brought to the bar. Now was I the third time uncaged, and then the most ancient spoke and pleaded against me. I do not well remember his speech, because I was too much frighted to receive the tones of his voice without disorder, and because also in declaiming, He made use of an instrument which stunned me with its noise.

It was a speaking trumpet, which he had chosen on purpose that by its martial sound he might rouse them to my death, and by that emotion of their spirits hinder reason from performing its office. As it happens in our armies, where the noise of drums and trumpets hinders the soldiers from minding the importance of their lives. When he had done, I rose up to defend my cause, but I was excused from it by an accident that will surprise you. Just as I had opened my mouth, a man who with much ado had pressed through the crowd, fell at the king's feet, and a long while rolled himself upon his back in his presence. This practice did not at all surprise me, because I knew it to be the posture they put themselves into, when they have a mind to be heard in public.

I only stopped my own harangue and gave ear to his. Just judges, said he, listen to me. You cannot condemn that man, that monkey or parrot, for saying that the moon from whence he comes is a world for if he be a man though he will not come from the moon since all men are free is not he free also to imagine what he pleases how can you constrain him not to have visions as well as you you may very well force him to say that the moon is not a world but he will not believe it for all that for to believe a thing some possibilities inclining more to the yea than to the nay must offer to one's imagination and unless you furnish him that probability or his own mind hit upon it he may very well tell you what he believes but still remain an infidel i am now to prove that he ought not to be condemned if you lift him in the catalogue of the beasts for suppose him to be an animal without reason would it be rational in you to condemn him for offending against it he hath said that the moon is a world now beasts act only by the instinct of nature it is nature then that says so and not he To think that wise nature, who hath made the world and the moon,

knows not herself what it is, and that ye who have no more knowledge but what ye derive from her should more certainly know it, would be very ridiculous. But if passion should make you renounce your principles, and you should suppose that nature does not guide beasts, blush at least to think on't, that the caprices of a beast should so discompose you. Really, gentlemen, should you meet with a man come to the years of discretion,

who made it his business to inspect the government of pismayers giving a blow to one that had overthrown its companion imprisoning another that had robbed its neighbor of a grain of corn and inditing a third for leaving its eggs would you not think him a madman to be employed in things so far below him and to pretend to give laws to animals that never had reason how will you then most venerable assembly justify yourselves for being so concerned at the caprices of that little animal just judges i have no more to say when he had made an end all the hall rung again with a kind of musical applause and after all the opinions had been canvassed during the space of a large quarter of an hour the king gave sentence that for the future I should be reputed to be a man, accordingly set at liberty, and that the punishment of being drowned should be converted into a public disgrace, the most honourable way of satisfying the law in that country, whereby I should be obliged to retract openly what I had maintained in saying that the moon was a world, because of the scandal that the novelty of that opinion might give to weak brethren. This sentence being pronounced, I was taken away out of the palace, richly clothed,

but in derision carried in a magnificent chariot as on a tribunal which four princes in harness drew and in all the public places of the town i was forced to make this declaration good people i declare to you that this moon here is not a moon but a world and that the world below is not a world but a moon this the council thinks fit you should believe end of chapter eleven section fourteen of a voyage to the moon by cyrano de bergerac translated by archibald lovel this librovoc's recording is in the public domain chapter twelve of a philosophical entertainment after i had proclaimed this in the five great places of the town my advocate came and reached me his hand to help me down i was in great amaze when after i had eyed him i found him to be my spirit we were an hour in embracing one another come lodge with me said he for if he you return to court after a public disgrace you will not be well looked upon nay more i must tell you that you would have been still amongst the apes yonder as well as the spaniard your companion if i had not in all companies published the vigour and force of your wit and gained from your enemies the protection of the great men in your favours i ceased not to thank him all the way till we came to his lodgings there he entertained me till supper-time with all the engines he had set a work to bring to his lodgings there he entertained me till supper-time with all the engines he had set a work to bring prevail with my enemies, notwithstanding the most specious pretexts they had used for riding the mobile to desist from so unjust a prosecution.

But as they came to acquaint us that supper was upon the table, he told me that to bear me company that evening he had invited two professors of the University of the town to sup with him. I'll make them, said he, fall upon the philosophy which they teach in this world, and by that means you shall see my landlord's son. He's as wittier youth as ever I met with. He would prove another Socrates, if he could use his parts are right,

and not bury in vice the graces wherewith God continually visits him by affecting a libertinism as he does, out of a chimerical ostentation and affectation of the name of a wit. I have taken lodgings here that I may lay hold on all opportunities of instructing him. He said no more that he might give me the liberty to speak if I had a mind to it, and then made a sign that they should strip me of my disgraceful ornaments, in which I still glistered. The two professors, whom we expected, entered just as I was undressed, and we went to sit down to table where the cloth was laid,

and where we found the youth he had mentioned to me fallen to already. They made him a low reverence, and treated him with as much respect as a slave does his lord. I asked my spirit the reason of that, who made me answer that it was because, of his age, seeing in that world the age had rendered all kind of respect and difference to the young, and which is far more, that the parents obeyed their children, so soon as by the judgment of the Senate of philosophers they had attained to the years of discretion. You're amazed, continued he, at a custom so contrary to that of your country, but it is not all repugnant to reason.

For say, in your conscience, when a brisk young man is at his prime in imagining, judging, and acting, is not he fitter to govern a family than a decrepit piece of three-score years, dull and doting, whose imagination is frozen under the snow of sixty winters, who follows no other guide but what you call the experience of happy successes, which are no more but the bare effects of chance, against all the rules and economy of humane prudence? And as for judgment, he hath but little of that neither, though the people of your world make it the portion of old age. But to undeceive, them, they must know that that which is called prudence in an old man is no more but a panic

apprehension, and a mad fear of acting anything where there is danger, so that when he does not run a risk wherein a young man hath lost himself, it is not that he foresaw the catastrophe, but because he had not fire enough to kindle those noble flashes which make us dare. Whereas the boldness of that young man was as a pledge of the good success of his design, because the same ardor that speeds and facilitates the execution thrust him upon the undertaking. As for execution, I should wrong your judgment if I endeavoured to convince it by proofs. You know that youth alone is proper for action. And were you not fully persuaded of this?

Tell me, pray, when you respect a man of courage, is it not because he can revenge you on your enemies or oppressors? And does anything but mere habit make you consider him, when a battalion of seventy januaries hath frozen his blood and chilled all the noble heats that youth is warmed with? When you yield to the stronger, is it not that he should be obliged to you for a victory which you cannot dispute him? Why then should you submit to him when laziness has softened his muscles, weakened his arteries, evaporated his spirits, and sucked the marrow out of his bones? If you adore a woman, is it not because of her beauty?

Why should you then continue your cringes When old age hath made her a ghost Which only represents a hideous picture of death? In short, when you loved a witty man, It was because by the quickness of his apprehension He unravelled an intricate affair, seasoned the choicest companies with his quaint sayings, And sounded the depth of sciences with a single thought.

And do you still honour him When his worn organs disappoint his weak noddle, When he has become dull and unethers? uneasy in company, and when he looks like an aged fairy rather than a rational man. Conclude then from thence son that it is fitter young men should govern families than old, and the rather that according to your own principles, Hercules, Achilles, Epaminondas, Alexander, and Caesar, of whom most part died under forty years of age, could have merited no honors as being too young in your account, though their youth was the only cause of their

famous actions, which a more advanced age would have rendered ineffectual as wanting that heat and promptitude that rendered them so highly successful. But you'll tell me that all the laws of your world do carefully enjoin the respect that is due to old men. That's true, but it is as true also that all who made laws have been old men, who feared that young men might justly have dispossessed them of the authority they had usurped. You owe nothing to your mortal architector but your body only. Your soul comes from heaven, and chance might have made your father your son, as now you are his. Nay, are you sure he hath not hindered you from inheriting a crown?

Your spirit left heaven, perhaps with a design to animate the king of the Romans, in the womb of the empress. It casually encountered the embryo of you, by the way, and it may be to shorten its journey, went and lodged there. No, no, God would never have raised your name out of the list of mankind, though your father had died a child. But who knows whether you might not have been at this day the work of some valiant captain that would have associated you to his glory,

as well as to his estate? So that, perhaps, you are no more indebted to your father, for the life he hath given you, than you would be to a pirate who had put you in chains, because he feeds you. Nay, grant he had begot you a prince or king, a present loses its merit when it is made without the option of him who receives it. Caesar was killed, and so was Cassius too. In the meantime, Cassius was obliged to the slave, from whom he begged his death,

but so was not Caesar to his murderers who forced it upon him. Did your father consult your will and pleasure when he embraced your mother? Did he ask you if you thought fit to see that age, or to wait for another? if you would be satisfied to be the son of a sot, or if you had the ambition to spring from a brave man. Alas, you whom alone the business concerned were the only person not consulted in the case. Maybe, then, had you been shut up anywhere else than in the womb of nature's ideas, and had your birth been in your own opinion, you would have said to the parker, my dear lady, take another spindle in your hand.

I have lain very long in the bed of nothing, and I had rather continue, and hundred years still without a being than to be today, that I may repent of it tomorrow. However, be you must. It was to no purpose for you to whimper and squall to be taken back again to the long and darksome house they drew you out of. They made as if they believed you cried for the teat. These are the reasons, at least some of them, my son, why parents bear so much respect to their children. I know very well that I have inclined to the children's side more than injustice I ought, and that in favour of them I have spoken a little against my conscience. But since I was willing to repress the pride of some parents

who insult over the weakness of their little ones, I have been forced to do as they do, who, to make a crooked tree straight, bend it to the contrary side, that between two conversions it may become even. Thus I have made fathers restore to their children what they have taken from them, by taking from them a great deal that belonged to them.

That so, another time. time they may be content with their own. I know very well also that by this apology I have offended all old men, but let them remember that they were children before they were fathers, and young before they were old, and that I must needs have spoken a great deal to their advantage, seeing they were not found in a parsley bed. But in fine, fall back, fall edge, though my enemies draw up against my friends, it will go well enough still with me, for I have obliged all men, and only disoblige but one half. With that he held his tongue, and our landlord's son spoke in this manner.

Give me leave, said he to him, since by your care I am informed of the original, history, customs and philosophy of the world of this little man, to add something to what you have said, and to prove that children are not obliged to parents for their generation, because their parents were obliged in conscience to procreate them. The strictest philosophy of their world acknowledges that it is better to die, since to die one must have lived, than not to have had a being. Now, seeing by not giving a being to that nothing, I leave it in a state worse than death, I am more guilty in not producing than in killing it. In the meantime, my little man, thou wouldst think thou hadst committed an unpardonable parasite shouldst thou have cut thy son's throat.

It would indeed be an enormous crime, but it is far more execrable, not to give a being to that which is capable of receiving it. For that child, whom thou deprivest of life forever, hath had the satisfaction of having enjoyed it for some time. Besides, we know that it is but deprived of it, but for some ages. But these forty poor little nothings, which thou mightest have made forty good soldiers for the king, thou art so malicious as to deny them life,

and lettest them corrupt in thy reins to the danger of an apoplexy which will stifle thee. This philosophy did not at all please me, which made me three or four times shake my head, but our preceptor held his tongue because supper was mad to be gone. We laid ourselves along, then, upon very soft quilts covered with large carpets, and a young man that waited on us, taking the oldest of our philosophers, led him into a little parlour apart, where my spirit called, called to him to come back to us as soon as he had supped. This humour of eating separately gave me the curiosity of asking the cause of it.

He'll not relish, said he, the steam of meat, nor yet of herbs, unless they die of themselves, because he thinks they are sensible of pain. I wonder not so much, replied I, that he abstains from flesh, and all things that have had a sensitive life. For in our world, the Pythagoreans, and even some holy Anchorites, have followed that rule, but not to dare, for instance, cut a cabbage for fear of hurting it. That seems to me altogether ridiculous.

And for my part, answered my spirit, I find a great deal of probability in his opinion. For tell me, is not that cabbage you speak of a being existent in nature as well as you? Is not she the common mother of you both? Yet the opinion that nature is kinder to mankind than to cabbage kind tickles and makes us laugh.

But seeing she is incapable of passion, she can neither love nor hate anything. And were she susceptible of love, she would rather bestow her affection upon this cabbage, which you grant cannot offend her, than upon that man who would destroy her if it lay in his power. And moreover, man cannot be born innocent, being a part of the first offender.

But we know very well that the first cabbage did not offend its creator. if it be said that we are made after the image of the supreme being, and so is not the cabbage, grant that to be true. Yet by polluting our soul, wherein we resembled him, we have effaced that likeness, seeing nothing is more contrary to God than sin. If then our soul be no longer his image, we resemble him no more in our feet, hands, mouth, forehead, and ears

than a cabbage in its leaves, flowers, stalk, pith, and head. Do not you really think that if this poor plant could speak, when one cuts it, it would not say, Dear brother, man, what have I done to thee that deserves death? I never grow but in gardens, and am never to be found in desert places, where I might live in security. I disdain all other company but thine, and scarcely am I sowed in thy garden, when to show thee my good will I blow, stretch out my arms to thee, to offer thee my children in grain. and as a requital for my civility thou causest my head to be chopped off.

Thus would a cabbage discourse if it could speak. Well, and because it cannot complain, may we therefore justly do it all the wrong which it cannot hinder? If I find a wretch bound hand and foot, may I lawfully kill him because he cannot defend himself? So far from that that his weakness would aggravate my cruelty. And though this wretched creature be poor and destitute of all the advantages which we have,

yet it deserves not death and when of all the benefits of a being it hath only that of increase we ought not cruelly to snatch that away from it to massacre a man is not so great sin as to cut and kill a cabbage because one day the man will rise again but the cabbage has no other life to hope for by putting to death a cabbage you annihilate it but in killing a man you make him only change his habitations nay i'll go farther with you still since god God doth equally cherish all his works, and hath equally divided the benefits betwixt us and plants. It is but just we should have an equal esteem for them as for ourselves. It is true we were born first, but in the family of God there is no birthright. If then the cabbage share not with us in the inheritance of immortality, without doubt that want was made up by some other advantage, that may make amends for the shortness of its being,

maybe by an universal intellect, or a perfect knowledge of all things in their causes, and it's for that reason that the wise mover of all things hath not shaped for it, organs like ours, which are proper only for a simple reasoning, not only weak, but many times fallacious too, but others more ingeniously framed, stronger, and more numerous, which serve to manage its speculative exercises. You'll ask me, perhaps, whenever any cabbage imparted those lofty conceptions to us, but tell me again whoever discovered to us certain beings which we allow to be above us to whom we bear no analogy nor proportion and whose existence it is as hard for us to comprehend as the understanding and ways whereby a cabbage expresses itself to its like though not to us because our senses are too dull to penetrate so far moses the greatest of philosophers who drew the knowledge of nature from the fountain-head nature herself hinted this truth to us when

he spoke of the tree of knowledge. And without doubt he intended to intimate to us under that figure that plants, in exclusion to mankind, possess perfect philosophy. Remember then, oh, thou proudest of animals, that though a cabbage which thou cuttest, sayeth not a word, yet it pays it at thinking. But the poor vegetable has no fit organs to howl as you do, nor yet to frisk it about and weep, yet it hath those that are proper to complain of the wrong you do it, and to draw a judgment from heaven upon you for the injustice. But if you still demand of me how I come to know that cabbage and colworts conceive such pretty thoughts, then I will ask you, how come you to know that they do not?

And that some amongst them, when they shut up at night, may not compliment one another as you do, saying, good night, master coal-curled pate. your most humble servant good master cabbage roundhead so far was he gone on in his discourse when the young lad who had led out our philosopher led him in again what supped already cried my spirit to him he answered yes almost the physiognomist having permitted him to take a little more with us our young landlord stayed not till i should ask him the meaning of that mystery i perceive said he you wonder at this way of lily know then that in your world the government of health is too much neglected and that our method is not to be despised in all houses there is a physiognomist entertained by the public who in some manner resembles your physicians save that he only prescribes to the healthful and judges of the different manners how we are to be treated only according to the proportion figure and symmetry of our members by the features of the face the complexion the softness of the skin the agility of the body, the sound of the voice, and the color, strength, and hardness of the hair. Did not you just now mind a man of a pretty low stature who eyed you? He was the physiognomist of the house.

Assure yourself that according as he observed your constitution, he hath diversified the exhalation of your supper. Mark the quilt on which you lie, how distant it is from our couches. Without doubt, he judges your constitution to be far different from ours. since he feared that the odour which evaporates from those little pipkins that stand under our noses might reach you or that yours might steam to us at night you'll see him choose the flowers for your bed with the same circumspection end of chapter twelve section fifteen of a voyage to the moon by cyrano de bergerac translated by archibald lovel this librovoc's recording is in the public domain chapter thirteen of the little animals that may make up our life and likewise cause our diseases and of the disposition of the towns in the moon. During all this discourse I made signs to my landlord that he would try if he could oblige the philosophers to fall upon some head of the science which they professed. He was too much, my friend,

not to start an occasion upon the spot, but not to trouble the reader with the discourse and entreaties that were previous to the treaty, wherein jest and earnest were so wittily interwover that it can hardly be imitated, I'll only tell you that the doctor who came last, after many things, spake as follows. It remains to be proved that there are infinite worlds in an infinite world.

Fancy to yourself, then, the universe is a great animal, and that the stars, which are worlds, are in this great animal, as other great animals that serve reciprocally for worlds to other peoples, such as we, our horses, etc., that we in our turns are likewise worlds to certain other animals, incomparably less than ourselves,

such as nits, lice, handworms, etc. And that these are an earth to others, more imperceptible ones, in the same manner as every one of us appears to be a great world to these little people. Perhaps our flesh, blood, and spirits are nothing else but a contexture of little animals that correspond, lend us motion from theirs, and blindly suffer themselves to be guided by our will, which is their coachman, or otherwise conduct us, and all conspiring together, produce that action which we call life. for tell me pray is it a hard thing to be believed that alas takes your body for a world and that when any one of them travels from one of your ears to the other his companions say that he hath travelled the earth from end to end or that he hath run from one pole to the other yes without doubt those little people take your hair for the forests of their country the pores full of liquor for fountains buboes and pimples for lakes and ponds

boils for seas and deflctions for deluges and when you comb yourself forwards and backwards they take that agitation for the flowing and ebbing of the ocean doth not itching make good what i say what is the little worm that causes it but one of these little animals which hath broken off from civil society that it may set up for a tyrant in its country if you ask me why are they bigger than other acceptable creatures, I ask you, why are elephants bigger than we? And the Irish men than Spaniards? As to the blisters and scurf, which you know not the cause of, they must either happen by the corruption of their enemies, which these little blades have killed, or which the plague has caused by the scarcity of food,

for which the seditious worried one another and left mountains of dead carcasses rotting in the field, or because the tyrant, having driven away on all hands his companions, who by their bodies stopped up the pores of ours, hath made way out for the waterish matter, which being extravasted out of the sphere of the circulation of our blood is corrupted. It may be asked, perhaps, why a knit or handworm produces so many disorders. But that's easily conceived, for as one revolt begets another,

so these little people, egged on by the bad example of, their seditious companions, aspire severally to sovereign command, and occasion everywhere war, slaughter and famine. But you'll say some are far less subject to itching than others, and nevertheless all are equally inhabited by these little animals, since you say they are the cause of our life. That's true, for we observe that phlegmatic people are not so much given to scratching as the choleric, Because the people, sympathizing with the climate they inhabit, are slower in a cold body than those others that are heated by the temper of their region, who frisk and stir and cannot rest in a place. Thus a choleric man is more delicate than a phlegmatic, because being animated in many more parts, and the soul being the action of these little beasts, he is capable of feeling in all places where these cattle stir.

whereas the phlegmatic man, wanting sufficient heat to put that stirring mobile in action, is sensible but in a few places. To prove more plainly that universal vermicularity, you need but consider when you are wounded how the blood runs to the sore. Your doctors say that it is guided by provident nature, who would succour the parts debilitated, which might make us conclude that besides the soul and mind, there were a third intellectual substance that had distinct organs and functions.

And therefore it seems to me far more rational to say that these little animals finding themselves attacked send to demand assistance from their neighbours, and thus recruits flocking in from all parts and the country being too little to contain so many, they either die of hunger or we stifled in the press. That mortality happens when the boil is ripe, for as an argument that these animals at that time are stifled,

the flesh becomes insensible now if blood-letting which is many times ordered to divert the fluxion do any good it is because being much lost by the orifice which these little animals laboured to stop they refuse their allies assistance having no more forces than is enough to defend themselves at home thus he concluded and when the second philosopher perceived by all our looks that we longed to hear him speak in his turn men said he seeing you a-cure curious to instruct this little animal our like in somewhat of the science which we profess i am now dictating a treatise which i wish he might see because of the light it gives to the understanding of our natural philosophy it is an explication of the original of the world but seeing i am in haste to set my bellows at work for to-morrow without delay the town departs i hope you'll excuse my want of time and i promise to satisfy you as soon as the town is arrived at the place whither it is to-reuthers to go. At these words the landlord's son called his father to know what it was a clock, who having answered him that it was past eight, he asked him in a great rage, why he did not give him notice at seven, according as he had commanded him, that he knew well enough the houses were to be gone tomorrow, and that the city walls were already upon their journey.

Son, replied the good man, since you sat down to table there is an order published that no house shall budge before next day. That's all one, answered the young man. You ought blindly to obey, not to examine my orders, and only remember what I commanded you. Quick, go fetch me your effigies. So soon as it was brought, he took hold on by the arm and whipped it a whole quarter of an hour. Away, you ne'er be good, continued he. As a punishment for your disobedience, it's my will and pleasure that this day you serve for a laughing-stock to all people, and therefore I command you, not to walk but upon two legs till night. The poor man went out in a very mournful condition,

and the young man excused to us his passion. I had much ado, though I bit my lip, to forbear laughing at so pleasant a punishment, and therefore to take me off of this odd piece of pedantic discipline, which without doubt would have made me burst out at last, I prayed my philosopher to tell me what he meant by that journey of the town he talked of, and if the houses and walls travelled dear stranger answered he we have some ambulatory towns and some sedentary the ambulatory as for instance this wherein now we are are built in this manner

the architector as you see builds every palace of a very light sort of timber supported by four wheels underneath in the thickness of one of the walls he places ten large pair of bellows whose snouts pass in a horizontal line through the upper story from one pinnacle to the other so that when towns are to be removed from one place to another for according to the seasons they change the air every one spreads a great many sails upon one side of the house before the noses of the bellows then having wound up a spring to make them play in less than eight days time their houses by the continual puffs which these windy monsters blow are driven if one pleases and hundred leagues and more for those which we call sedentary they are almost like to your towers save that they are of timber and that they have a great and strong screw or vice in the middle reaching from the top to the bottom whereby they may be hoisted up or let down as people please Now the ground underneath is dug as deep as the house is high, and it is so ordered that so soon as the frosts begin to chill the air, they may sink their houses down underground, where they keep themselves secure from the severity of the weather. But as soon as the gentle breathings of the spring begin to soften and qualify the air, they raise them above ground again, by means of the great screw I told you of. End of Chapter 13 Section 16 of A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac

Translated by Archibald-Luvel This Librevox recording is in the public domain Chapter 14 Of the original of all things, of atoms and of the operation of the senses I prayed him since he had showed so much goodness and that the town was not to part till next day

that he would tell me somewhat of that original of the world which he had mentioned not long before. And I promise you, said I, that in requital, so soon as I am got back to the moon, from whence my governor, pointing to my spirit, will tell you that I am come, I'll spread your renown there by relating the rare things you shall tell me.

I perceive you laugh at that promise because you do not believe that the moon I speak of is a world, and that I am an inhabitant of it. But I can assure you also that the people of that world, who take this only for a moon, will laugh at me when I tell you that your moon is a world, and that there are fields and inhabitants in it? He answered only with a smile, and spake in this manner. Since in ascending to the original of this great all, we are forced to run into three or four absurdities, it is but reasonable we should follow the way

wherein we may be least apt to stumble. I say then that the first obstacle that stops us short is the eternity of the world, and the minds of men not being able enough to conceive it, and being no more able to imagine that this great universe, so lovely and so well-ordered, could have made itself. They have had their recourse to creation. But like to him that would leap into a river for fear of being wet with rain, they save themselves out of the clutches of a dwarf by running into the arms of a giant. And yet they are not safe for all that, for that eternity which they deny the world, because they cannot comprehend it, they attribute it to God, as if he stood in need of that present,

and as if it were easier to imagine it in the one than in the other. For tell me, pray, was it ever yet conceived in nature, how something can be made of nothing? Alas! Betweenst nothing and an atom only, there are such infinite disproportions that the sharpest wit could never dive into them. Therefore, to get out of this inextricable labyrinth, you must admit of a matter eternal with God. But you'll say to me, Grant, I should allow you that eternal matter, how could that chaos dispose and order itself?

That's the thing I am about to explain to you. My little animal, after you have mentally divided every little visible body into an infinite many little invisible bodies, You must imagine that the infinite universe consists only of these atoms, which are most solid, most incorruptible, and most simple, whose figures are partly cubical, partly parallelograms, partly angular, partly round, partly sharp-pointed, partly pyramidal, partly six-cornered and partly oval, which act all severally according to their various figures.

And to show that it is so, put a very round ivory bowl upon a very smooth place, and with the least touch you give it will be half a quarter of an hour before it rest. Now I say that if it were perfectly round, as some of the atoms I speak of are, and the surface on which it is put perfectly smooth, it would never rest. If art then be capable of inclining a body to a perpetual motion, why may we not believe that nature can do it? It's the same with the other figures of which the square requires a perpetual rest, Others an oblique motion, others are half motion as trepidation.

And the round, whose nature is to move, joining a pyramidal, makes that, perhaps, which we call fire. Because not only fire is in continual agitation, but also because it easily penetrates. Besides, the fire hath different effects, according to the openings and quality of the angles, when the round figure is joined. For example, the fire of pepper is another thing than the fire of sugar. The fire of sugar differs from that of cinnamon, that of cinnamon from that of the clove, and this from the fire of a faggot.

Now the fire, which is the architect of the parts and whole of the universe, hath driven together and congregated into an oak, the quantity of figures which are necessary for the composition of that oak. But you'll say, how could hazard congregate into one place all the figures that are necessary for the production of that oak? I answer that it is no one thing. that matter so disposed should form an oak, but the wonder should have been greater, if the matter being so disposed the oak had not been produced. Had there been a few less

of some figures it would have been an elm, a poplar, a willow, and fewer of them still, it would have been the sensitive plant, an oyster, a worm, a fly, a frog, a sparrow, an ape, a man. If three dice being flung upon a table there happen a raffle of two, or all, a three, a four, and a five, or two sixes and a third in the bottom, would you say, oh, strange, that each die should turn up such a chance when there were so many others? A sequence of three hath happened. Oh, strange, two sixes turned up, and the bottom of the third. Oh, strange. I am sure that being a man of sense, you will never make such exclamations. For since there is but a certain quantity of numbers upon the dice, it's impossible, but some of them must turn up. And you wonder, after that, how matter shuffled together pell-mell, as chance-pleases,

should make a man, seeing so many things were necessary for the construction of his being. You know not, then, that this matter tending to the fabric of a man hath been a million times stopped in its progress for forming sometimes a stone, sometimes lead, sometimes coral, sometimes flower, sometimes a comet, and all because of more or less figures that were acquired for the framing of a man. so that it is no great wonder if amongst infinite matters which incessantly change and stir some have hit upon the construction of the few animals vegetables and minerals which we see than if in a hundred casts of the dice one should throw a raffle nay indeed it is impossible that in this hurling of things nothing should be produced and yet this will be always admired by a blockhead who little knows how small a matter would have made it to have been otherwise when the great river of makes a mill to grind or guides the wheels of a clock and the brook of only runs and sometimes abscons you will not say that that river hath a great deal of wit because you know that it hath met with things disposed for producing such rare feats

for had not the mill stood in the way it would not have ground the corn had it not met the clock it would not have marked the hours and if the little revulet i speak of had met with the same opportunities it would have wrought the very same miracles just so it is with the fire that moves of itself for finding organs fit for the act of reasoning it reasons when it finds only such as a proper for sensation it sensates and when such as a fit for vegetation it vegetates and to prove it is so put out but the eyes of a man the fire of whose soul makes him to see and he will cease to see just as our great clock will leave off to make the hours if the movements of it be broken in fine these primary and indivisible atoms make a circle whereon without difficulty move the most perplexed difficulties of natural philosophy not so much as even the very operation of the senses which nobody hitherto hath been able to conceive but i will easily explain by these little bodies let us begin with the sight it deserves as being the most incomprehensible our first essay it is performed then as i imagine when the tunicles of the eye whose pores resemble those of glass transmitting that fiery dust which is called visual rays the same is stopped by some opacous matter which makes it recoil and then meeting in its retreat the image of the object that forced it back and that image being but an infinite number of little bodies exhaled in an equal surface from the object beheld it pursues it to our eye you'll not fail to object i know that glass is an opacous body and very compact and very compact and that and that nevertheless, instead of reflecting other bodies, it lets them pass through. But I answer that the pores of glass are shaped in the same figure as those atoms

are which pass through it. And as a wheat sieve is not proper for sifting of oats, nor an oat-sive to sift wheat, so a box of deal-board, though it be thin and lets a sound go through it, is impenetrable to the sight, and a piece of crystal, though transparent and pervious to the eye, is not penetrable to the touch. i could not here forbear to interrupt him a great poet and philosopher of our world said i hath after epicurus and democritus spoken of these little bodies in the same manner almost as you do and therefore you don't at all surprise me by that discourse only tell me i pray as you proceed how according to your principles you'll explain to me the manner of drawing your picture in a looking-glass that's very easy replied he for imagine with your own your own

yourself that those fires of our eyes having passed through the glass and meeting behind it an opacous body that reverberates them they come back the way they went and finding those little bodies marching in equal superfices upon the glass they repel them to our eyes and our imagination hotter than the other faculties of our soul attracts the more subtle whereby it draws our picture in little it is as easy to conceive the act of hearing and for brevity's sake let us only consider it in the harmony of a lute touched by the hand of a master. You'll ask me, how can it be that I perceive at so greater distance a thing which I do not see? Does there a sponge go out of my ears that drinks up that music and brings it back with it again? Or does the player beget in my head another little

musician with another little lute who has orders like an echo to sing over to me the same airs? No, but that miracle proceeds from this, that the string-touching-touches. That the string-touches, striking those little bodies of which the air is composed drives it gently into my brain with those little corporeal nothings that sweetly pierce into it and according as the string is stretched the sound is high because it more vigorously drives the atoms and the organ being thus penetrated furnisheth the fancy wherewith to make a representation if too little then our memory not having as yet finished its image we are forced to repeat the same sound to it again to the end it may take enough of materials, which, for instance, the measures of a saraband furnish it with, for finishing the picture of that saraband. But that operation is nothing near so wonderful as those others which by the help of the same organ excite us sometimes to joy, sometimes to anger. And this happens when in that motion these little bodies meet with other little bodies within us, moving in the same manner, or whose figure renders them susceptible of the same agitation.

for then these newcomers stir up their landlords to move as they do, and thus, when a violent air meets with the fire of our blood, it inclines it to the same motion and animates it to a sally, which is the thing we call heat of courage. If the sound be softer, and have only force enough to raise a less flame in greater agitation, by leading it along the nerves, membranes, and through the interstices of our flesh,

it excites that tickling, which is called joy. And so it happens, in the ebullition of the other passions, according as these little bodies are more or less violently tossed upon us, according to the motion they receive by the encounter of other agitations, and according as they find dispositions in us for motion. So much for hearing. Now, I think the demonstration of touching will be every whit as easy if we conceive that out of all palpable matter there is a perpetual emission of little bodies, and that the more we touch them, the more evaporates, because we press them out of the subject

itself as water out of a sponge when we squeeze it. The hard maker report to the organ of their hardness, the soft of their softness, the rough, etc. And since this is so, we are not so quaint in feeling with hands used to labour because of the thickness of the skin, which being neither porous nor animated, with difficulty transmits the evaparations of matter. Some perhaps may desire to know where the organ of touching has its residence. For my part, I think it is spread all over the surface of the body, seeing in all parts it feels. Yet I imagine that the nearer the member wherewith we touch be to the head the sooner we distinguish, which experience convinces us of, when with shut eyes we handle anything, for

then we'll more easily guess what it is, and if on the contrary we feel it with our hinder feet, it will be harder for us to know it. And the reason is because our skin being all over-perforated, our nerves, which are of no compact a matter, lose, by the way, a great many of those little atoms through the little holes of their contexture before they reach the brain,

which is their journey's end. It remains that I speak of the smelling and tasting. Pray tell me, when I taste a fruit, is it not because the heat of my mouth melts it? Confess to me, then, that there being salts in a pear, and that they being separated by dissolution

into little bodies of a different figure from those which make the taste of an apple. They must needs pierce our palate in a very different manner. Just so as the thrust of a pike that passes through me is not like the wound which a pistol bullet makes me feel with a sudden start. And as that pistol bullet makes me suffer another sort of pain than that of a slug of steel, I have nothing to say as to the smelling,

seeing the philosophers themselves confess that it is performed by a continual emission of little bodies. Now upon the same principle will I explain to you the creation, harmony, and influence of the celestial globes, with the immutable variety of meteors. He was about to proceed, but the old landlord coming in made our philosopher think of withdrawing. He brought in crystals full of glow-worms to light the parlour, but seeing those little fiery insects lose much of their light when they are not fresh gathered, these which were ten days old had hardly any at all my spirit stayed not till the company should complain of it but went up to his chamber and came immediately back again with two bowls of fire so sparkling that all wondered he burnt not his fingers these incombustible tapers said he will serve us better than your weak of worms they are rays of the sun which i have purged from their heat otherwise the corrosive qualities of their fire would have dazzled and offended your eyes I have fixed their light and enclosed it within these transparent bowls.

That ought not to afford you any great cause of admiration, for it is not harder for me, who am a native of the sun, to condense his beams which are the dust of that world, than it is for you to gather the atoms of the pulverized earth of this world. Thereupon our landlord sent a servant to wait upon the philosopher's home, it being then night, with a dozen globes of glow-worms, hanging at his four legs. As for my preceptor and myself, we went to rest, by order of the physiognomist. He laid me that night in a chamber of violets and lilies, and ordered me to be tickled after the usual

manner. End of Chapter 14. Section 17 of A Voyage to the Moon by Cirano de Bergerac, translated by Archibald Lovell. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. chapter fifteen of the books in the moon and their fashion of death burial and burning of the manner of telling the time and of noses next morning about nine o'clock my spirit came in and told me that he was come from court where one of the queen's maids of honour had sent for him and that she had inquired after me protesting that she still persisted in her design to be as good as her word that is that with all her heart she would follow me if i would take her along with me to the other world which exceedingly pleased me said he when i understood that the chief motive which inclined her to the voyage was to become christian and therefore i have promised to forward her design what lies in me and for that end to invent a machine that may hold three or four wherein you may mount to-day both together if you think fit i'll go seriously set about the performance of my undertak and in the meantime to entertain you during my absence, I leave you here a book which heretofore I brought with me from my native country. The title of it is The States and Empires of the Sun,

with an addition of the history of the spark. I also give you this, which I esteem much more. It is the great work of the philosophers composed by one of the greatest wits of the sun. He proves in it that all things are true and shows the way of uniting physically the truths of every contradiction, as for example that white is black and black white, that one may be and not be at the same time, that there may be a mountain without a valley,

that nothing is something, and that all things that are are not. But observe that he proves all these unheard-off paradoxes without any captious or sophistical argument. When you are weary of reading, you may walk or converse with our love, landlord's son, he has a very charming wit. But that which I dislike in him is, that he is a little atheistical. If he chanced to scandalise you, or by any argument shake your faith,

fail not immediately to come and propose it to me, and I'll clear the difficulties of it. Any other but I would enjoin you to break company with him. But since he is extremely proud and conceited, I am certain he would take your flight for a defeat, and would believe your faith to be grounded on no reason if you refused to hear his. Having said so, he left me, and no sooner was his back turned, but I fell to consider attentively my books and their boxes, that's to say, their covers, which seemed to me to be wonderfully rich. The one was cut of a single diamond, incomparably more splendid than ours. The second looked like a prodigious great pearl, cloven in two. My spirit had translated those books into the language.

of that world, but because I have none of their print, I'll now explain to you the fashion of these two volumes. As I opened the box, I found within somewhat of metal, almost like to our clocks, full of I know not what, little springs and imperceptible engines. It was a book indeed, but a strange and wonderful book that had neither leaves nor letters. In fine, it was a book made holy for the ears, and not the eyes. So that when anybody has a mind, to read in it he winds up that machine with a great many strings then he turns the hand to the chapter which he desires to hear and straight as from the mouth of a man or a musical instrument proceed all the distinct and different sounds which the lunar grandees make use of for expressing their thoughts instead of language when i since reflected on this miraculous invention i no longer wondered that the young men of that country were more knowing at sixteen or eighteen years old than the graybeards of our clients For knowing how to read as soon as speak, they are never without lectures, in their chambers, their walks, the town, or travelling.

They may have in their pockets, or at their girdles, thirty of these books, where they need but wind up a spring to hear a whole chapter, and so more, if they have a mind to hear the book quite through, so that you never want the company of all the great men, living and dead, who entertain you with living voices. This present employed me about an hour, and then hanging them to my ears like a pair of pendants, I went a walking, but I was hardly at end of the street when I met a multitude of people, very melancholy. Four of them carried upon their shoulders a kind of a hearse, covered with black.

I asked a spectator what that procession, like to a funeral in my country, meant. He made me answer that that naughty, called so by the people because of a knock he had received upon the right knee being convicted of envy and ingratitude died the day before and that twenty years ago the parliament had condemned him to die in his bed and then to be interred after his death i fell a-loughing at that answer and he asking me why you amaze me said i that that which is counted a blessing in our world as a long life a peaceable death and an honourable burial should pass here for an exemplary punishment? What? Do you take a burial for a precious thing then? replied that man.

And in good earnest, can you conceive anything more horrid than a corpse crawling with worms at the discretion of toads which feed on his cheeks? The plague itself clothed with the body of a man? Good God! The very thought of having, even when I am dead, my face wrapped up in a shroud, and a pike depth of earth upon my mouth, makes me I can hardly fetch breath.

The wretch whom you see carried here, besides the disgrace of being thrown into a pit, hath been condemned to be attended by an hundred and fifty of his friends, who were strictly charged as a punishment for their having loved an envious and ungrateful person, to appear with a sad countenance at his funeral. And had it not been that the judges took some compassion of him, imputing his crimes partly to his want of wit,

they would have been commanded to weep there also. All are burnt here except malefactors, and indeed it is a most rational and decent custom, for we believe that the fire, having separated the pure from the impure, the heat by sympathy reassembles the natural heat which made the soul, and gives it forced to mount up till it arrive at some star, the country of certain people more immaterial and intellectual than us,

because their temper ought to suit with and participate of the globe which they inhabit. However, this is not our neatest way of burying, neither. For when any one of our philosophers comes to an age, wherein he finds his wit begin to decay, and the ice of his years to numb the motions of his soul, he invites all his friends to a sumptuous banquet. Then having declared to them the reasons that move him to bid farewell to nature,

and the little hopes he has of adding anything more to his worthy actions, they show him favour. That's to say, they suffer him to die, or otherwise are severe to him and command him to live. When then, by plurality of voices, they have put his life into his own hands, he acquaints his dearest friends with the day and place. These purge, and for four and twenty hours abstain for a meeting.

Then being come to the house of the sage, and having sacrificed to the sun, they enter the chamber where the day, generous philosopher waits for them on a bed of state. Everyone embraces him, and when it comes to his turn whom he loves best, having kissed him affectionately, leaning upon his bosom, and joining mouth to mouth, with his right hand, he sheaths a dagger in his heart. I interrupted this discourse, saying to him that told me all, that this manner of acting much resembled the ways of some people of our world. And so pursued my walk, which was so long that when I

came back, dinner had been ready two hours. They asked me why I came so late. It is not my fault, said I to the cook who complained. I asked what it was a clock, several times in the street, but they made me no answer but by opening their mouths, shutting their teeth, and turning their faces awry. How, cried all the company, did you not know by that, that they showed you what it was a clock? Faith, said I, they might have held their great noses in the sun long enough before I had understood what they meant. It's a commodity, said they, that saves them the trouble of a watch. For with their teeth they make so true a dial that when they would tell anybody the

hour of the day, they do no more but open their lips, and the shadow of that nose falling upon their teeth, like the gnomon of a sun-dial, makes the precise time. Now, that you may know the reason why all people in this country have great noses. as soon as a woman is brought to bed, the midwife carries the child to the master of the seminary, and exactly at the year's end, the skillful being assembled, if his nose proves shorter than the standing measure,

which an alderman keeps, he is judged to be a flat nose, and delivered over to be gilt. You'll ask me, no doubt, the reason of that barbarous custom and how it comes to pass that we, amongst whom virginity is a crime, should enjoin' continence by

force. But know that we do so because after thirty ages experience we have observed that a great nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous, and liberal man, and that a little nose is a sign of the contrary. Wherefore of flat noses we make eunuchs, because the Republic had rather have no children at all than children like them. He was still a speaking when I saw a man come in stark naked. I presently sat down and put on my hat to show him honour, for these are the greatest marks of respect that can be showed to any in that country. The kingdom, said he, desires you would give the magistrate's notice before you return to your own world, because a mathematician hath just now undertaken before the council that provided when you are returned home you would

make a certain machine that he'll teach you how to do. He'll attract your globe and join it to this. During all this discourse, we went on with our dinner, and as soon as we rose from table, we went to take the air in the garden. We're taking occasion to speak of the generation and conception of things. He said to me, you must know that the earth, converting itself into a tree, from a tree into a hog, and from a hog into a man, is an argument that all things in nature aspire to be men, since that is the most perfect being as being a quintessence, and the best devised mixture in the world, which alone unites the animal and rational life into one. None but a pedant will deny me this, when we see that a plum tree, by the heat of its germ,

as by a mouth, sucks in and digestes the earth that's about it, that a hog devours the fruit of this tree and converts it into the substance of itself, and that a man, feeding on that hog, reconcocts that dead flesh, unites it to himself, and makes that animal to revive under a more noble species. So the man whom you see, perhaps three score years ago, was no more but a tuft of grass in my garden, which is the more probable that the opinion of the Pythagorean metamorphosis, which so many great men maintain, in all likelihood, has only reached us to engage us into an inquiry after the truth of it.

As, in reality, we have found that matter, and all that has a vegetative or sensitive life, when once it hath attained to the period of its perfection, wheels about again and descends into its inanity, that it may return upon the stage and act the same parts over and over. I went down extremely satisfied to the garden, and was beginning to rehearse to my companion what our master had taught me, when the physiognomist came to conduct us to supper, and afterwards to rest. End of Chapter 15. Section 18 of A Voyage to the Moon by Sirano de Bergerac, translated by Archibald Lovell. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Chapter 16. Of miracles and of curing by the imagination. Next morning, so soon as I awoke, I went to call up my antagonist. It is, said I, accosting him, as great a miracle to find a great wit like yours, buried in sleep, as to see fire without heat and action. He bore with this ugly compliment, but, cried he with a cold, O'Leric kind of love, will you never leave these fabulous terms? Know that these names defame the name of a philosopher, and that seeing the wise man sees nothing in the world but what he conceives,

and judges may be conceived, he ought to abhor all those expressions of prodigies and extraordinary events of nature, which blockheads have invented to excuse the weakness of their understanding. I thought myself then obliged in conscience to endeavour to undeceive him, and therefore said I, Though you be very stiff and obstinate in your opinions, yet I have plainly seen supernatural things happen.

Say you so, continued he. You little know that the force of imagination is able to cure all the diseases which you attribute to supernatural causes, by reason of a certain natural balsam, that contains qualities quite contrary to the qualities of the diseases that attack us. Which happens when our imagination informed by pain searches, in that place for the specific remedy, which it applies to the poison.

That's the reason why an able physician of your world advises the patient to make use of an ignorant doctor whom he esteems to be very knowing, rather than of a very skillful physician whom he may imagine to be ignorant, because he fancies that our imagination laboring to recover our health, provided it be assisted by remedies, is able to cure us,

but that the strongest medicines are too weak when not applied by imagination. Do you think it's strange that the first men of your world lived so many ages without the least knowledge of physic? No. And what might have been the cause of that in your judgment? Unless their nature was as yet in its force, and that natural balsam in vigor, before they were spoiled by the drugs wherewith physicians consume you?

It being enough then for the recovery of one's health, earnestly to wish for it, and to imagine himself cured. So that their vigorous fancies, plunging into that vital oil, extracted the elixir of it, and applying actives to passives, in almost the twinkling of an eye they found themselves as sound as before, which, notwithstanding the deprivation of nature, happens even at this day, though somewhat rarely, and is by the multitude called a miracle. For my part, I believe not a jot-aunt, and have this to say for myself, that it is easier for all these doctors. us to be mistaken, than that the other may not easily come to pass. For I put the question to them, a patient recovered out of a fever, heartily desired during his sickness, as it is

like, that he might be cured, and may be made vows for that effect, so that of necessity he must either have died, continued sick, or recovered. At he died, then would it have been said, kind heaven hath put an end to his pains? Nay, and that according to his prayers. And that according to his prayers, he was now cured of all diseases, praised be the Lord. Had his sickness continued, one would have said, he wanted faith, but because he is cured, it's a miracle forsooth. Is it not far more likely that his fancy, being excited by violent desires, hath done its duty and wrought the cure?

For Grant he hath escaped, what then? Must it needs be a miracle? How many have we seen, pray, and after many solemn vows and protestant, go to pot with all their fair promises and resolutions. But at least replied I to him, if what you say of that balsam be true, it is a mark of the rationality of our soul. Seeing without the help of our reason

or the concurrence of our will, she acts of herself. As if being without us, she applied the active to the passive. Now, if being separated from us she is rational, it necessarily follows that she is spiritual. And if you acknowledge her to be spiritual, I conclude she is immortal. Seeing death happens to animals only by the changing of forms,

of which matter alone is capable. The young man at that, decently sitting down upon his bed and making me also to sit, discoursed as I remember in this manner. As for the soul of beasts, which is corporeal, I do not wonder they die, seeing the best harmony of the four qualities may be dissolved, the greatest force of blood quelled, and the loveliest proportion of organs disconcerted. But I wonder very much that our intellectual, incorporeal and immortal soul should be constrained to dislodge and leave us by the same cause that makes an ox to perish. As she covenanted with our body, that as soon as he should receive a prick with a sword in the heart, a bullet in the brain, or a musket shot through the chest, she should pack up and be gone?

And if that soul was spiritual and of herself so rational that being separated from our mass she understood as well as when clothed with a body Why cannot blind men Born with all the fair advantages of that intellectual soul Imagine what it is to see Is it because they are not as yet deprived of sight

By the death of all their senses? How? I cannot then make use of my right hand Because I have a left and in fine to make a just comparison which will overthrow all that you have said i shall only allege to you a painter who cannot work without his pencil and i'll tell you that it is just so with the soul when she wants the use of the senses yet they have the soul which can only act imperfectly because of the loss of one of her tools in the course of life to be able then to work to perfection when after our death she hath lost them all if they tell me over and over again that she needeth not these instruments for performing her functions i'll tell them in so that then all the blind about the streets ought to be whipped at a cat's ass for playing the counterfeats in pretending not to see a bit he would have gone on in such impertinent arguments had i not stopped his mouth by desiring him to forbear as he did for fear of a quarrel for he perceived i began to be in a heat so that he departed and left me admiring the people of that world amongst whom even the meanest have naturally so much wit whereas those of ours have so little and yet so dearly bought

end of chapter sixteen section nineteen of a voyage to the moon by cyrano de bergerac translated by archibald lovel this librovoc's recording is in the public domain chapter seventeen of the author's return to the earth At length my love for my country took me off of the desire and thoughts I had of staying there. I minded nothing now but to be gone, but I saw so much impossibility in the matter that it made me quite peevish and melancholic. My spirit observed it, and having asked me what was the reason that my humour was so much altered, I frankly told him the cause of my melancholy. But he made me such fair promises concerning my return that I relied wholly upon him. I acquainted the council with my design, who sent for me, and made me take an oath

that I should relate in our world all that I had seen in that. My passports then were expedited, and to my spirit having made necessary provisions for so long a voyage, asked me what part of my country I desired to light in. I told him that since most of the rich youths of Paris, once in their lifetime, made a journey to Rome, imagining after that that there remained no more, more worth the doing or seeing, I prayed him to be so good as to let me imitate them.

But with all, said I, in what machine shall we perform the voyage? And what orders do you think the mathematician, who talked other day of joining this globe to ours, will give me? As to the mathematician, said he, let that be no hindrance to you, for he is a man who promises much and performs little or nothing. And as to the machine that's to carry you back, it shall be the same which brought you to court. how said i will the air become as solid as the earth to bear your steps i cannot believe that and it is strange replied he that you should believe and not believe pray why should the witches of your world who march in the air and conduct whole armies of hail snow rain and other meteors from one province into another have more power than we pray have a little better opinion of me than to think i would impose upon you the truth is said i i have received so many good offices from you as well as socrates and the rest for whom you have had so great kindness that i dare trust myself in your hands as now i do resigning myself heartily up to you

i had no sooner said the word but he rose like a whirlwind and holding me between his arms without the least uneasiness he made me pass that vast space which astronomers reckon betwixt the moon and us in a day and a half's time which convinced me that they tell a lie who say that a millstone would be three hundred three score and i know not how many years more in falling from heaven since i was so short a while in dropping down from the globe of the moon upon this at length about the beginning of the second day i perceived i was drawing near our world since i could already distinguish europe from africa and both from asia when i smelt brimstone which i saw steaming out of a very high mountain that incommoded me so much that I fainted away upon it. I cannot tell what befell me afterwards, but coming to myself again I found I was amongst briers on the side of a hill amidst some shepherds who spoke Italian. I knew not what was become of my spirit,

and I asked the shepherds if they had not seen him. At that word they made the sign of the cross, and looked upon me as if I had been a devil myself. But when I told them that I was a Christian, and that I begged the charity of them, that they would lead me to some place where I might take a little rest. They conducted me into a village about a mile off. Where no sooner was I come, but all the dogs of the place, from the least cur to the biggest mastiff, flew upon me, and had torn me to pieces if I had not found a house wherein I saved myself.

But that hindered them not to continue their barking and bawling, so that the master of the house began to look upon me with an evil eye. and really I think as people are very apprehensive when accidents which they look upon to be ominous happen. That man could have delivered me up as a prey to these accursed beasts, had I not bethought myself that that which madded them so much at me was the world from whence I came. Because being accustomed to bark at the moon, they smelt I was come from thence, by the scent of my clothes,

which stuck to me as a sea-smell hangs about those who have been long on shipboard. for some time after they come ashore. To air myself, then, I lay three or four hours in the sun upon a terrace walk, and being afterwards come down the dogs, who smelt no more that influence which had made me their enemy, left barking, and peaceably went to their several homes. Next day I parted for Rome, where I saw the ruins of the triumphs of some great men,

as well as of ages. I admired those lovely relics. and the repairs of some of them made by the modern at length having stayed there a fortnight in company of monsieur de sirano my cousin who advanced me money for my return i went to chivivivivacia and embarked in a galley that carried me to marseilles during all this voyage my mind run upon nothing but the wonders of the last i made at that time i began the memoirs of it and after my return put them into as good order as sickness which confines me to bed would permit but foreseeing that it will put an end to all my studies and travels that i may be as good as my word to the council of that world i have begged of m le bray my dearest and most constant friend that he would publish them with the history of that world-i have begged of m le bray my dearest and most constant friend that he would publish them with the history of the history of that of the republic of the sun that of the spark and some other pieces of my composing if those who have stolen them from us restore them to him as i earnestly adjure them to do end of chapter seventeen end of a voyage to the moon by sirano de bergerac