[Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician by Alfred Jarry]

Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician

"There are eight abodes, eight places of sight, eight
deities, and eight Purushas. Whoever understands
those Purushas in their division, and again in their
union, has overcome the world. I ask thee about the
Purusha in the Upanishads. And thou explain not him
to me, thy head will faIt off." S'akalya knew him not,
so his head fell off. Moreover robbers took away his
bones, mistaking them for something else.
- THE BRIHAD A'RANYAKA UPANISHAD

BOOK ONE

PROCEEDINGS

1

SUMMONS PURSUANT
TO ARTICLE 819


In this year Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-eight, the Eighth
day of February, Pursuant to article 819 of the Code of Civil Procedure
and at the request of M. and Mme. Bonhomme (Jacques), proprietors
of a house situate at Paris, 100 bis, rue Richer, the aforementioned
having address for service at my residence and further at the Town Hall
of Q borough.
I, the undersigned, Rene-Isidore Panmuphle, Bailiff attached to
the Civil Court of First Instance of the Department of Seine, in session
at Paris, residing in said City, 37, rue Payee, Do hereby summon in
the name of the LAW and of JUSTICE, Monsieur Faustroll, doctor,
tenant of various premises dependent upon the house aforementioned,
residing at Paris, 100 bis, rue Richer, and having proceeded to the
aforementioned house, bearing upon its exterior the number 100,
and having rung, knocked, and called the aforementioned variously

and successively, no person having opened the door to us, and the
next door neighbors declaring to us that this is indeed the residence
of said M. Faustroll, but that they were unwilling to accept
a copy of this writ and, inasmuch as I did find at said premises neither
relations nor servants, nor any neighbor willing to accept
service of this present copy by subscribing to the original thereto,
I did proceed forthwith to the Town Hall of Q borough at which
place I did personally deliver this present copy to his Worship the
Mayor, who did certificate the original thereto; within the maximum
period of twenty-four hours, to pay to the claimant into my hands as tender
in full and valid quittance the sum of Three Hundred and
Seventy-two thousand francs 27 centimes, in respect of Eleven quarters
rental of the aforementioned premises due on the Firsr day of January
last, without prejudice to those subsequently falling due and to any and
all other rights, actions, interests, costs and distraint, declaring to the
aforementioned that failing satisfaction of this present Summons within
said period of time, he shall be constrained thereto by all lawful means,
and notably by the seizure and impounding of such goods and chaltels
as may be present on the premises leased. Wherefore I did deposit this
present copy of the foregoing at the premises aforesaid. Cost: eleven
francs 30 centimes, including 112 sheet of special stamped paper at 0 fr.
60 centimes.
PANMUPHLE
To Monsieur Faustroll, Doctor,
c/o the Town Hall of Q borough,
Paris.

2

CONCERNING THE HABITS AND BEARING
OF DOCTOR FAUSTROll

Doctor Faustroll was sixty-three years old when he was born in
Circassia in 1898 (the 20th century was [-2] years old).
At this age, which he retained all his life, Doctor Faustroll was
a man of medium height, or, to be absolutely accurate, of (8 x
10^10 + 10 ^9 + 4 x 10^8 + 5 x 10^6) atomic diameters; with a golden-
yellow skin, his face clean-shaven, apart from a few sea-green
mustachios, I as worn by king Saleh; the hairs of his head alternately
platinum blonde and jet black, an auburn ambiguity
changing according to the sun's position; his eyes, two capsules of
ordinary writing-ink flecked with golden spermatozoa like Danzig
schnapps.
He was beardless, apart from his mustachios, through the judicious
use of baldness microbes which permeated his skin from the
groin to the eyelashes and ate away all the follicles, without any
need for Faustroll to fear that his scalp-hair or eyebrows might fall
out, since these microbes attack only fresh young hairs. From his
groin down co his feet, in contrast, he was sheathed in a satyric
black fur, for he was man to an improper degree.
That morning he took his daily sponge bath of two-tone wallpaper
painted by Maurice Denis, with a design of trains climbing

up spirals; a long time ago he had given up water in favor of wallpaper
- seasonable, fashionable, or according to his whim.
So as not to embarrass the populace, he drew on over this
design a shirt made of quarrz fiber; baggy trousers of dull black
velvet drawn tight at the ankles; tiny little gray boots, with even
layers of dust carefully preserved on them, at great expense, for
many months past, broken only by the dry geysers of ant-lions; a
golden-yellow silk waistcoat, exactly the same color as his skin,
with no more buttons than an undervest, and two rubies as buttons
for the breast pockets, very high up; and a greatcoat lined with
blue fox fur.
On his right index finger, he piled emerald and topaz rings
right up to the fingernail - the only one of the ten which he did
not bite - and the line of rings was kept in place by a specially
designed linchpin made of molybdenum, screwed into the bone of
the ungual phalanx, through the fingernail.
By way of a tie, he passed around his neck the ceremonial ribbon
of the Great Strumpot, an Order invented by himself and
patented to avoid any vulgarization.
He hanged himself by this ribbon on a specially constructed
gibbet, procrastinating for a few quarter-hours between the choice
of the two asphyxiating make-ups called white hanged man and blue
hanged man,
And, after cutting himself down, he put on a solar topee.

3

SERVICE OF WRIT

In this year Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-eight, this
tenth day of February, at Eight o'clock in the morning, pursuant
to article 819 of the Code of Civil Procedure and at the request of
M. and Mme. Bonhomme (Jacques), the husband both in his own
name and in support and authorization of the lady his spouse, proprietors
of a house situate at Paris, no. 100 bis, rue Richer, the
aforementioned having address for service at my residence and further
at the Town Hall ofQ borough,
I, THE UNDERSIGNED, RENE-ISIDORE PANMUPHLE,
BALIFF ATTACHED TO THE CIVIL COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE
OF THE DEPARTMENT OF SEINE, IN SESSION AT PARIS,
RESIDING IN SAID CITY, 37 RUE PAVEE, do hereby summon in
reiteration in the name of the Law and of Justice M. Faustroll, doctor,
tenant of various premises dependent upon the house
aforementioned, residing therein at the aforementioned rue Richer,
No. 100 bis, which bears at present the number 100, where having
proceeded and having knocked variously and successively
without obtaining a reply, we betook ourselves to Paris, to the
office of M. Solarcable, commissioner of police, the latter granting
us his assistance in our undertaking; to pay to myself as Bailiff
and bearer of said summons, the sum of Three Hundred and

Seventy-two thousand francs 27 centimes in respect of Eleven
quarters rental of the aforementioned premises without prejudice
to other claims, the named party having refused payment of these
claims.
Wherefore I have seized in distraint and placed under the
authority of the Law and of Justice the following objects:

4

CONCERNING THE EQUIVALENT BOOKS
OF DOCTOR FAUSTROLL

In the premises detailed above, entry having been effected by M.
Lourdeau, locksmith at Paris, no. 205, rue Nicolas Flamel, with
the exception of a bed of polished copper mesh, twelve meters long
and without bedding, of an ivory chair and of an onyx and gold
table; sequestration made of twenty-seven assorted volumes, some
paper-backed and others bound, with the following titles:
1. BAUDELAIRE, a volume of E.A. POE translations.
2. BERGERAC, Works, volume II, containing the History of
the States and Empires of the Sun, and the History of Birds.
3. The Gospel According to SAINT LUKE, in Greek.
4. BLOY, The Ungrateful Beggar.
5. COLERIDGE, The Rime of the Ancient lvlariller.

6. DARIEN, The Thief
7, DESBORDES-VALMORE, The Oath of the Little Men.
8. ELSKAMP, Illuminated Designs.
9. An odd volume of the Plays of FLORIAN.
10. An odd volume of The Thousand and One Nights, in the
GALLAND translation.
11. GRABBE,Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung,
comedy in three acts.
12. KAHN, The Tale of Gold and of Silence.
13. LAUTREAMONT, The Lays of Maldoror.
14. MAETERLINCK, Aglavaine and Selysette.
15. MALLARME, Verse and Prose.
16. MENDES, Gog.
17. The Odyssey, Teubner's edition.
18. PELADAN, Babylon.
19. RABELAIS.
20. JEAN DE CHILRA, The Sexual Hour.
21, HENRI DE REGNIER, The Jasper Cane.
22. RIMBAUD, The Illuminations.
23. SCHWOB, The Childrens' Crusade.
24. Ubu Roi.
25. VERLAINE, Wisdom.
26. VERHAEREN, The Hallucinated Landscapes.
27. VERNE, Voyage to the Center of the Earth.

In addition, three prints hanging on the walls, a poster by
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, Jane Avril; one by BONNARD, advertising
the Revue Blanche; a portrait of Doctor Faustroll, by AUBREY
BEARDSLEY; and an old picture, which appeared to us to be valueless,
Saint Cado, issued by the Oberthur printing house of Rennes.
It was impossible to enter the cellar due to the flooding thereof
It appeared to be filled, to a height of two meters, with a mixture
of wine and spirits, though no barrels or bottles were to be seen.
I have installed as guardian thereof, in absence of the subject
of distraint, M. Delmor de Pionsec, one of my witnesses named
hereunder. The sale will take place on whatever day shall ultimately
be decided, at the hour of noon, in the Place de l'Opera.
And from all the aforementioned facts, I have assembled the
present official report, the compilation of which occupied me from
eight in the morning until a quarter before three in the afternoon,
and of which I have left a copy for the subject of distraint, in the
hands of his excellency the aforenamed commissioner of police,
and with the guardian, and without prejudice to any further
actions, the above matter wholly in the presence of and assisted by
Messrs. Delmor de Pionsec and Troccon, attorneys-at-law, residing
at Paris, 37 rue Pavee, the required witnesses who have with
myself signed original and copy. Cost thirty-two francs 40 centimes.
For the copies were used two sheets of official paper
costing I fr. 20 centimes. Signed: Lourdeau, locksmith. Signed:
Solarcable, commissioner of police. Signed: Delmor de Pionsec.

Signed: Panmuphle, bailiff. Registered at Paris, the 11th day of
February 1898. Received five francs. Signed: Liconet. True copy
certified. (Illegible.)

5

NOTICE OF WARRANT
ENABLING IMMEDIATE SALE

In tjis year Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-eight, the Fourth
day of June, at the request of M. and Mme. Bonhomme (Jacques),
the husband residing at Paris, rue Pavee, 37, electing domicile in my
office and further at the Town Hall of Q borough; I, the undersigned,
Rene-Isidore Panmuphle, BALIFF attached to the Civil Court
of First Instance of the Department of the Seine, in session at Paris, residing
in said City, 37, rue Pavee, have signified) declared, and under the
above heading deposited copy with M. Faustroll...

*

Whereas this present half-sheet of special stamped paper at 60
centimes is insufficient to record the diverse marvels which I discovered
at the home of the said Doctor Faustroll, having drunk
my fill in the cellar into which he had hurled me; the present

deponent provisionally does solicit the favor of his honor the
President of the Civil Tribunal of the Seine to authorize, in so far
as the cost of stamped paper does threaten to exceed largely the
amount deposited, the description of the ensuing events on unstamped
paper, so that a record may be retained for the Law and
for Justice of the said marvels, and that such record may not perish.

6

CONCERNING THE DOCTOR'S BOAT,
WHICH IS A SIEVE

TO C.V. BOYS

Doctor Faustroll, arising from under the sheets covering the
polished copper bed which I was not authorized to seize, and
addressing himself to me, speaking to me personally, said:
"It is probable that you have no conception, Panmuphle, writ-
carrying bailiff, of capillarity, of surface tension, nor of weightless
membranes, equilateral hyperbolae, surfaces without curvature,
nor, more generally, of the elastic skin which is water's epidermis.
"Since the days when saints and miracle-workers went sailing
In stone troughs or on coats of coarse cloth, and when Christ
walked barefoot on the sea, I know of no creature - apart from

myself - other than the filiform water~scorpion and the larvae of
water-gnats, capable of making use of the surface of ponds, either
from above or beneath, as a solid floor.
"It is true that it has been possible to construct sacks made
from a material which allows air and steam to pass through but is
impermeable to water, so that one can blowout a candle through
the cloth and yet the same cloth will retain its liquid content indefinitely.
My colleague F, de Romilly has succeeded in boiling
liquids in a bell jar whose base was made of gauze with a fairly
wide mesh...
"But this bed, twelve meters long, is not a bed but a boat,
shaped like an elongated sieve. The meshes are wide enough to
allow the passage of a large pin; and the whole sieve has been
dipped in melted paraffin, then shaken so that this substance
(which is never really touched by water), while covering the web,
leaves the holes empty - the number of which amounts to about
fifteen million four hundred thousand. When I place my sieve on
the river, the water's skin tautens against the holes, and the
liquid flowing beneath cannot penetrate unless the skin breaks.
But the convexity of my round keel offers no projecting angle, and
the pressure of the water during launching, while jumping rapids,
etc., is reduced by an external non-paraffined shell with much
larger meshes, sixteen thousand only; this serves additionally to
protect the paraffin glaze from being scratched by reeds, just as an
interior grill saves it from damage by feet.

"My sieve, then, floats like a boat, and can be laden without
sinking to the bottom. Not only that, it possesses this advantage
over ordinary boats - as my learned friend C. V. Boys has
remarked to me - that one can allow a thin jet of water to fall on
it without submerging it. If I should decide to expel my urates, or
if a wave should break over the side, the liquid will simply pass
through the mesh and rejoin the external waves.
"In this perpetually dry boat (called a skiff, doubtless because
it is constructed to carry three people), I shall henceforth take up
my residence, since I am forced to leave this house ... "
"Doubtless," I said, "because the premises are no longer
furnished. "
"I also possess an even finer skiff," continued the doctor, "of
quartz fiber drawn out by means of a crossbow; but at the present
moment I have just deposited thereon, with the aid of a straw,
250,000 drops of castor oil, in imitation of the beads on spiders'
webs, alternately large and small beads, the vibrations per second
of the latter being to the vibrations per second of the former in the
proportion of 64,000/1,500,000 under the sole influence of the
pressure of the liquid's elastic skin. This skiff has every appear
ance of a huge genuine spider's web, and catches flies just as easily.
But it is only fitted out for one person.
"And since the present one carries three people, you shall
accompany me, and someone else to whom you will shortly be
introduced - not to mention some others, for I am bringing along

some beings who have managed to escape your Law and your
Justice between the lines of my seized volumes.
"And while I enumerate them, and summon the other person,
here is a book, hand-written by myself, which you can seize as the
twenty-eighth volume and read, so that you may not only contain
yourself in patience but may also very probably understand me better
during the course of this voyage, though I am not asking your
opinion about its necessity."
"Yes, but this navigation in a sieve .. "
"The skiff is not only propelled by oar blades but also by suction
disks at the end of spring levers. And its keel travels on three
steel rollers at the same level. I am all the more convinced of the
excellence of my calculations and of its insubmersibility in that, as
is my invariable habit, we shall not be navigating on water but on
dry land."

7

CONCERNING THE CHOSEN FEW

Across the foliated space of the twenty-seven equivalents, Faustroll
conjured up into the third dimension:
From Baudelaire, E. A. Poe's Silence, taking care to retranslate
late Baudelaire's translation into Greek.

From Bergerac, the precious tree into which the nightingale-king
and his subjects were metamorphosed, in the land of the sun.
From Luke, the Calumniator who carried Christ on to a
high place.
From Bloy, the black pigs of Death, retinue of the Betrothed.
From Coleridge, the ancient mariner's crossbow and the
ship's floating skeleton, which, when placed in the skiff, was sieve
upon sieve.
From Darien, the diamond crowns of the Saint-Gothard
rock-drillers,
From Desbordes-Valmore, the duck placed by the woodcutter
at the children's feet, and the fifty-three trees with scored barks.
From Elskamp, the hares, running over the sheets, which
became cupped hands and carried the spherical universe like a
fruit.
From Florian, Scapin's lottery ticket.
From The Thousand and One Nights, the eye of the third
Kalender, who was the son of a king: the eye poked out by the tail
of the flying horse.
From Grabbe, the thirteen journeymen tailors massacred at
dawn by Baron Mordax on the order of the knight of the papal
order of Civil Merit, and the table napkin which he tied round his
neck beforehand.
From Kahn, one of the golden peals from the celestial goldsmiths'
shops.

From Lalltreamonc, the scarab, beautiful as the trembling of
hands in alcoholism, which vanished over the horizon.
From Maeterlinck, the lights heard by the first blind sister.
From Mallarme, the virgin, the bright, and the beautiful today.
From Mendes, the north wind which blew upon the green sea
and blended with its salt the sweat of the galley slave who rowed
until he was a hundred and twenty years old.
From The Odyssey, the joyful walk of the irreproachable son of
Peleus in the meadow of asphodels.
From Peladan, the reflection, in the mirror of the shield silvered
with ancestral ashes, of the sacrilegious massacre of the
seven planets.
From Rabelais, the little bells to which the devils danced during
the tempest.
From Rachilde, Cleopatra,
From Regnier, the sorrel plain where the modern centaur
snorted.
From Rimbaud, the icicles hurled by the wind of God into
the waters.
From Schwob, the scaly animals imitated by the whiteness of
the leper's hands.
From Ubu Roi, the fifth letter of the first word of the first act.
From Verhaeren, the cross made by the spade in the horizon's
four brows.
From Verlaine, voices asymptotic toward death.

From Verne, the two and a half leagues of the earth's crust.
Meanwhile, Rene-Isidore Panmuphle, bailiff, began to read
Faustroll's manuscript in deep darkness, substantiating the invisible
ink of sulphate whose other colors were locked in an opaque
box; until he was interrupted by the introduction of the third
traveler.

BOOK TWO

ELEMENTS OF PATAPHYSICS

TO THADEE NATANSON

8

DEFINITION

An epiphenomenon is that which is superinduced upon a
phenomenon.
Pataphysics, whose etymological spelling should be XXX (xxxx
xxxxxxxx) and actual orthography 'pataphysics, preceeded by an
apostrophe so as to avoid a simple pun, is the science of that
which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond
the latter's limitations, extending as far beyong metaphysics as the
latter extends beyong physics. Ex: an epiphenomenon being often
accidental, pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular,
despite the common opinion that the only science is that of
the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions,
and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or,

less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be - and perhaps
should be - envisaged in the place of the traditional one,
since the laws that are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional
universe are also correlations of exceptions, albeit more
frequent ones, but in any case accidental data which,\educed to
the status of unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the
virtue of originality.

DEFINITION. Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which
symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality,
to their lineaments.

Contemporary science is founded upon the principle of induction:
most people have seen a certain phenomenon precede or
follow some other phenomenon most often, and conclude therefrom
that it will ever be thus. Apart from other considerations, this
is true only in the majority of cases, depends upon the point of
view, and is codified only for convenience - if that! Instead of
formulating the law of the fall of a body toward a center, how far
more apposite would be the law of the ascension of a vacuum
toward a periphery, a vacuum being considered a unit of nondensity,
a hypothesis far less arbitrary than the choice of a concrete
unit of positive density such as water?
For even this body is a postulate and an average man's point
of view, and in order that its qualities, if not its nature, should

remain fairly constant, it would be necessary to postulate that the
height of human beings should remain more or less constant and
mutually equivalent. Universal assent is already a quite miraculous
and incomprehensible prejudice. Why should anyone claim that
the shape of a watch is round - a manifestly false proposition -
since it appears in profile as a narrow rectangular construction,
elliptic on thtee sides; and why the devil should one only have
noticed its shape at the moment of looking at the time? - Perhaps
under the pretext of utility. But a child who draws a watch as a circle
will also draw a house as a square, as a fa'rade, without any
justification, of course; because, except perhaps in the country, he
will rarely see an isolated building, and even in a street the facades
have the appearance of very oblique trapezoids.
We must, in fact, inevitably admit that the common herd
(including small children and women) is too dimwitted to comprehend
elliptic equations, and that its members are at one in a
so-called universal assent because they are capable of perceiving
only those curves having a single focal point, since it is easier to
oincide with one point rather than with two. These people communicate
and achieve equilibrium by the outer edge of their bellies,
tangentially. But even the common herd has learned that the real
universe is composed of ellipses, and tradesmen keep their wine in
barrels rather than cylinders.
So that we may not abandon, through digression, our usual

example of water, let us reflect, in this connection, upon the irreverence
of the common herd whose instinct sums up the adepts of
the science of pataphysics in the following phrase:

9

FAUSTROLL SMALLER THAN FAUSTROLL

TO WILLIAM CROOKES

Other madmen cried ceaseledy that the figure one was al the same
time bigger and smaller than itself, and proclaimed a number of
similar absurdities as if they were useful discoveries.
- THE TALISMAN OF ORAMANE

Doctor Faustroll (if one may be permitted to speak from personal
experience) desired one day to be smaller than himself and resolved
to explore one of the elements, in order to examine any disturbances
which this change in size might involve in their mutual
relationship.
For this purpose he chose that substance which is normally
liquid, colorless, incompressible and horizontal in small quantities;
having a curved surface, blue in depth and with edges rhat tend to
ebb and flow when it is stretched; which Aristotle terms heavy, like
earth; the enemy of fire and renascent from it when decomposed

explosively; which vaporizes at a hundred degrees, a temperature
determined by this fact, and in a solid state floats upon itself -
water, of course! And having shrunk to the classic size of a mite,
as a paradigm of smallness, he traveled along the length of a
cabbage leaf, paying no attention to his fellow mites or to the magnified
aspect of his surroundings, until he encountered the Water.
This was a globe, twice his size, through whose transparency
the outlines of the universe appeared to him gigantically enlarged,
whilst his own image, reflected dimly by the leaves' foil, was magnified
to his original size. He gave the orb a light tap, as if
knocking on a door: the deracinated eye of malleable glass
"adapted itself" like a living eye, became presbyopic, lengthened
itself along its horizontal diameter into an ovoid myopia, repulsed
Faustroll by means of this elastic inertia and became spherical once
more.
The doctor, taking small steps, rolled the crystal globe, with
some considerable difficulty, toward a neighboring globe, slipping
on the rails of the cabbage-leaf's veins; coming together, the two
spheres sucked each other in, tapering in the process, until suddenly
a new globe of twice the size rocked placidly in front of
Faustroll.
With the tip of his boot the doctor kicked out at this unexpected
development of the elements: an explosion, formidable in
its fragmentation and noise, rang out following the projection all
around of new and minute spheres, dry and hard as diamonds, that

rolled to and fro all along the green arena, each one drawing along
beneath it the image of the tangential point of the universe, distorting
it according to the sphere's projection and magnifying its
fabulous center.
Beneath everything, the chlorophyll, like a shoal of green
fishes, followed its charted currents in the cabbage's subterranean
canals ...

10

CONCERNING THE DOG FACED BABOON
BOSSE-DE-NAGE, WHO KNEW NO HUMAN
WORDS BUT "HA HA"

TO CHRISTIAN BECK

Hey, you, said Giromoll gravely; as for you, I'll fake your robe
for a storm-sail; your legs for masts, your arms for yardarms; your
body for the hull, and I'll f... well pitch you into the water with
six inches of steel in your stomach for ballast... And since, when
you are a ship, it's your fat head which will serve as a figurehead,
then I shall baptize you: the dirty b...
- EUGENE SUE, THE SALAMANDER
(LE PICHON JOUEIC DEIS DIABLES)

Bosse-de-Nage was a dogfaced baboon less cyno- than hydrocephalous,
and, as a result of this blemish, less intelligent than his
fellows. The red and blue callosity which they sport on their buttocks
was, in his case, displaced by Faustroll, by means of some
strange medication, and grafted on to his cheeks, azurine on one,
scarlet on the other, so that his flat face was a tricolor.
Not content with this, the good doctor wanted to teach
him to speak; and if Bosse-de-Nage (so named because of the
double protuberance of the cheeks described above) was not
completely familiar with the French language, he could pronounce
fairly correctly a few words of Belgian, calling the life
belt hanging at the stern of Faustroll's skiff "swimming-bladder
with inscription thereon," but more often he enunciated a tautological
monosyllable:
"Ha ha," he said in French; and he added nothing more.
This character will prove very useful during the course of this
book, to punctuate some of its overlong speeches: in the manner
of Victor Hugo (The Burgraves, part I, sc. 2):

And is that all?
- Nay, listen yet:

And Plato, in various passages:

- GREEK

Here follows the narrative of Rene-Isidore Panmuphle.

BOOK THREE

FROM PARIS TO
PARIS BY SEA

OR THE BELGIAN
FAMILY ROBINSON

TO ALFRED VALLETTE

Inquiring what men of learning there were then in the city, and
what wine they drank there.
- GARGANTUA, CHAPTER XVI

11

CONCERNING THE EMBARKATION IN THE ARK

Bosse-de-Nage descended with tiny steps, making sure of the flat
adhesion of his feet as one unrolls a glued poster, carrying the skiff
on his shoulder by the ears, in imitation of the ancient Egyptians
teaching their disciples. The red metal surface, like that of the
boat-fly, began to shine in the sun as the long boat ventured its
xyphoid twelve-meter long prow from out of the passageway. The
curved blades of the oars made a clangorous sound as they scraped
along the sides of the old stone walls.

"Ha ha!" said Bosse-de-Nage as he deposited the skiff upon
the pavement; but on this occasion he added nothing to his
statement.
Faustroll rubbed the rubicund cheeks of the cabin boy against
the grooves of the sliding seat to lubricate the mechanism; the
scorched face glowed more luminously still, swelling up in the bows
as a lantern to light our way. The doctor sat aft on his ivory chair:
between his legs was the onyx table covered with his compasses,
maps, sextants and various other scientific instruments; he threw
at his feet, in place of ballast, the curious beings retained from
his twenty-seven equivalent books and the manuscript seized by
myself; then he passed around his elbows the tiller's two guide
ropes, and motioning me to sit down, facing him, on the felt sliding
seat (which I could not help obeying, drunk as I was and ready
to believe anything), he shackled my feet to two leather fetters at
the bottom of the skiff, and thrust into my hands the handles of
the ash-wood oars, whose blades moved apart with the surging
symmetry of two peacock's feathers preening.
I pulled at the oars, moving in my backward position I knew
not whither, squinting between two lanes of moist lines in a gray
hotizontality, overtaking forms looming up from behind me which
the sharp-edged oars chopped off at the legs; other distant fotms
followed the direction we were taking. We ploughed through the
masses of people as through a dense fog, and the acoustical sign
of our progress was the screech of tearing silk.

Between the distant figures which followed us and those near
us which crossed our path, one could distinguish other figures,
vertical and more or less stationary. Faustroll consented to explain
to me that the function of navigators was to make land and to
drink, while the role of Bosse-de-Nage was to draw the skiff up on
to the bank at each halt on our errant way, as also to interrupt our
conversation, where a pause might be convenient, with his interjections;
thus, I gazed at the beings having into view from behind
me, in the same way as did the watchers in the Platonic den, and I
consulted on successive occasions the teaching of the vessel's master,
Faustroll the doctor.

12

CONCERNING THE SQUITTY SEA,
THE OLFACTORY LIGHTHOUSE, AND THE
ISLE OF CACK, WHERE WE DRANK NOT

TO LOUIS L...

"This dead body," said the doctor, "from whose carcass you can
see old fogies trembling in senility and young men with red hair,
equally cretinous in their speech and their silence, giving beaks full
of flesh to speckled, handwriting-colored birds, like ichneumon

flies boring into flesh to lay their eggs - this dead body is not only
an island but a man: he is pleased to call himself Baron Hildebrand
of rhe Squirty Sea.
"And since the island is sterile and desolate, he can grow no
kind of beard. He suffered from impetigo in childhood, and his
nurse, who was so old that her lore was sufficient to encourage
unusually copious stool, predicted to him that this was a sign that
he would be unable to dissimulate from anyone

the infamous nudity of his calf's muzzle.

"Only his brain - and the anterior motor centers of the
medulla - are dead. And because of this inertia he is, on our navigatory
route, not a man but an island, and this is why (if you both
behave, I will show you the map) ... "
"Ha ha!" said Bosse-de-Nage, waking up suddenly; then he
relapsed into an obstinate silence.
" ... This is why," continued Faustroll, "I find him mentioned
on my fluvial map as isle of Cack."
"Yes," 1 said, "but how is it that this crowd of people and
birds which has come to scatter obituaries on the corpse can raven
upon him with such confidence, in the middle of this vast plain,
while all these graybeards and young men, if I am not isobic to
chern, are blind and without sticks?"
"See here," said Faustroll, opening his seized manuscript, the

ELEMENTS OF PATAPHYSICS, book N, ch. S: Concerning
Obelischolychnies for dogs, while they are still baying at the moon.
"A lighthouse raises its pr... in a storm, says Corbiere; a
lighthouse lifts its finger to point out from afar the place of safety,
of truth and beauty. But for moles and for you toO, Panmuphle, a
lighthouse is as invisible as the ten thousand and first sonic interval
is imperceptible, or the infrared rays by whose light I have
written this book. The lighthouse of the isle of Cack is dark, subterranean,
and cloacal, as if it had looked at the sun too long. No
waves break against it, and thus no sound guides one to it. And
your cerumen, Panmuphle, would close your ears even to its subterranean
rumblings.
"This lighthouse nourishes itself upon the pure matter which
is the substance of the isle ofCack; that is to say, the Baron's soul,
exhaled from his mouth by a leaden blowpipe. From all the places
where I refuse to drink, flights of pages, guided by his scent, come
like magpies to suck life (their own, exclusive) from the syrupy and
smoking jet emanating from the saturnine blowpipe. And so that it
shall not be stolen from them, the graybeards, organized into a
monastery, have built upon the Baron's carcass a little chapel that
they have christened CATHOLlC MAXIMUM. The speckled birds
have their dovecotes there. The people call them young wild
duck We pataphysicians call them simply and honestly shitdiggers."

13

CONCERNING THE LAND OF LACE

TO AUBREY BEARDSLEY

After leaving this displeasing island behind, our map was refolded
and I rowed for another six hours, my toes held by fetters, my
tongue hanging out from thirst - we would have been mortally ill
had we taken a drink in that island - and Faustroll kept me drawn
so upright with the parallel jerks of the two cords of his tiller that,
in my backward motion, I could just see straight astern the island's
smoke still rising until it was hidden by the doctor's shoulders.
Bosse-de-Nage, so exhausted from thirst that he was quite livid,
gave out only a dim light.
Suddenly a purer light than this emerged from the shadows,
but in no way similar to the brutal genesis of the world.
The king of Lace drew out the light as a rope-maker plaits his
retrograde line, and the threads trembled slightly in the dim light,
like cobwebs. They wove themselves into forests, like the leaves
which hoarfrost engraves on windowpanes; then they fashioned
themselves into a Madonna and her Child in the Christmas snow;
t1l1dthen into jewels, peacocks, and gowns, intermingling like
the swimming dance of the Rhine maidens. The Beaux and the
Belles strutted and preened in imitation of fans, until their patient

gathering broke up with a cry. Just as the white junonians, roosting
in a park, complain raucously when the lying intrusion of a
lamp apes prematurely the dawn's reflection of their ocelli, so an
artless shape burgeoned in the forest of raked-over pine pitch; and
as Pierrot serenades the confusion of the moon's entwined ball,
the paradox of day burrowing underground arose from Ali Baba
screaming in the pitiless oil and the jar's darkness.
Bosse-de-Nage, as far as I could judge, understood these
prodigies very little.
"Ha ha," he said succinctly; and he did not lose himself in
further considerations.

14

CONCERNING THE FOREST OF LOVE

TO EMILE BERNARD

Like a tree frog out of water, the skiff edged forward, drawn by its
suction disks along a smooth descending road.
In this district of Paris no omnibus had ever passed, nor railway,
nor tramway, nor bicycle, nor probably any openwork boat
with a copper skin, moving upon three rollers set at the same level,
manned by a doctor pataphysician, who has at his feet the twenty-

seven most excellent quintessences of works brought back by
inquisitive men from their travels, manned also by a bailiff named
Panmuphle (I, Rene-Isidore, the undersigned) and by a hydrocephalous
baboon knowing no words of human language except ha
ha. Here, instead of street lamps we could see ancient monuments
of carved stone, green statues crouching down in robes folded in
the shape of hearts; heterosexual ring-dancers blowing into unmentionable
flageolets; finally, a seaweed-green calvary in which the
eyes of the women were like nuts cloven horizontally by the suture
line of their shells.
The incline opened out suddenly into the triangle of an open
space. The sky opened out too, and a sun burst open in it like the
yolk of a prairie oyster bursting in the throat, and the azure became
reddish blue; the sea was so warm that it steamed; the redyed
costumes of the passers-by were splashes of color more brilliant
than opaque precious stones.
"Are you Christians?" asked a bronzed man, dressed in a
gaudy smock, standing in the center of the little triangular town.
"Like M. Arouet, M. Renan, and M. Charbonnel," I answered
after some reflection.
"I am God," said Faustroll.
"Ha ha!" said Bosse-de-Nage, without further commentary.
Thus I remained in charge of the skiff with the baboon cabin
boy, who passed the time by jumping on my shoulders and pissing
down my back; but I beat him off with blows from a bundle of

writs, and observed with curiosity from far off the demeanor of the
gaily dressed man who had approved of Faustroll's answer.
They were seated beneath a great archway, behind which was
a second, and behind these there blazed the greenness and fatness
of an historiated field of cabbages. Between the arches were tables
and pitchers and benches set out in a barn and on a threshing floor,
crowded with people dressed in sapphire-blue velvet, with diamondshaped
faces and down-colored hair, the furry surface of the earth
and of the people's necks being both like cows' hair. Men were
wrestling in a blue and yellow meadow, disturbing sand-gray toads
whose frightened croaks reached me in the boat; couples danced
gavottes; and the bagpipes, from on top of the freshly drained
barrels, droned out the flight of ribbons of white tinsel and violet
silk.
Each of the two thousand dancers in the barn offered to
Faustroll a girdlecake, hard cube-shaped milk, and different
liqueurs in glasses as thick as a bishop's amethyst is wide and holding
less than a thimbleful. The doctor drank from them all. Each
person present threw a pebble into the sea, stinging the blisters on
my hands, novice oarsman that I was, as I held them up to protect
myself, and stinging the multicolored cheeks of Bosse-de-Nage.
"Ha ha!" he growled, to express his fury, but he remembered
his solemn oath.
The doctor returned to the sound of bells, with two big maps
of the country, which his guide had given him absolutely free; one

represented realistically, worked in tapestry, the forest surrounding
the triangular space: the rose-red foliage rising above the blue
mass of the grass, and the groups of women, the wave of each
group with its crest of white bonnets breaking gently against the
ground, in an eccentric circle of dawn shadow.
And on it was written: The forest of Loye. On the second map
were enumerated all the products of this happy land, men at the
market with their plump yellow pigs, themselves plump and blue,
stuffed into their clothes like sausages. They were all as blown
up as the cheeks of a bagpiper, as full of wind as a bagpipe or a
stomach.
The Christian host took leave of Faustroll courteously and
sailed away in his own boat toward a more distant land. And we
could see the red line of the sea's horizon cut the beam of his roseolored
sail.
We rubbed the adipose cheeks of the hydrocephalous baboon
against the slide rails of the felt seat; and when I had taken up
the oars once more, and Faustroll had taken the tiller's silken
guide ropes, I crouched and stretched out once again in the alternating
movements of the oarsman, over the conjoined waves of the
dry land.

15

CONCERNING THE GREAT STAIRCASE OF
BLACK MARBLE

TO LEON BLOY

At the valley's mouth, we skirted one final calvary, whose frightening
height might have led one to take it, at first sight, for a
gigantic, black, mass altar. At the blunt point of this improbable
marble pyramid, between two acolytes strongly resembling cynocephali
of Tanit, the huge king's head carbonized itself in the
moon's furnace. He was grasping a tiger by the scruff of its neck,
and was forcing the people of the Squitty Sea to climb up on hands
and knees. After their bones had first been slashed by the blades
of the successive steps, he let the monstrous hunter gorge itself
with their flesh from butchers' hooks gripped in his fist.
He welcomed Faustroll with honor, and, raising his arm from
the summit of the calvary, he deposited in our skiff a viaticum of
twenty-four Squitty sea-ears skewered on a unicorn's horn.

16

CONCERNING THE AMORPHOUS ISLE

TO FRANC-NOHAIN

This island is like soft coral, amoeboid and protoplasmic: its trees
closely resemble the gesture of snails making horns at us. Its government
is oligarchic. One of its kings, as the height of his pschent
indicated to us, lived upon the devotion of his seraglio; to escape
the judgment of his Parliaments, which was motivated by envy, he
has crawled through the drains right down to below the monolith
in the main square and has gnawed it away so as to leave a crust
only two inches thick. And thus he is two fingers' breadth away
from the gallows. Like Simon Stylites, he hides away in this hollow
olumn, since it is fashionable today to place nothing on the plat-
(orms of the capitals but statues, which are the best caryatids in
bad weather. He works, sleeps, loves and drinks on the verticality
of a long ladder, and has no other lamp in his waking hours than
thc pallor of his nuptials. One of his minor achievements is the
invention of the tandem, which extends to quadrupeds the benefits
of the pedal.
Another king, versed in halieutics, decorates with his fishing-lines
the cracks of circular railways resembling the beds of rivers

But the trains, with the cruelty of youth, chase fish before them or
crush embryonic bites in their bellies.
A third king has rediscovered the language of paradise, intelligible
even to animals, and has brought some of these animals to
perfection. He has manufactured electric dragonflies and has
counted the innumerable ants by use of the figure 3.
Another, remarkable for his hairless face, instructed us in useful
wiles, so that we became competent to make full use of our free
evenings, consolidate our dead drunk credits and gain, without
wasting our talent, the rewards of the French Academy.
Another mimes the thoughts of mankind, using personages of
whom he has kept only the top half of their bodies, so that there
may be nothing inside but what is pure.
Yet another is elaborating a huge rome, with the aim of computing
the qualities of the French, who, he claims, will be as brave
as they are gay, as gay as they are witty; in order to devote himself
entirely to this labor, he has contrived to lose his young progeny
in the forest during a country walk, profiting from a moment of
inattention on their part. And while we were banqueting in his
company and that of the other kings, on different rungs of the
great ladder, Bosse-de-Nage having the job of keeping its foot
steady, the shouts of the newshawks in the magical square informed
us that his nephews were that day, as on previous days, searching
desperately under the quincuncial trees for the venerable absent
one.

17

CONCERNING THE FRAGRANT ISLE

TO PAUL GAUGUIN

The Fragrant isle is completely sensitive, and fortified by madrepores
which retracted themselves, as we landed, into their
coral-red casemates. The skiff's mooring line was fastened around
a great tree that swayed in the wind like a parrot rocking itself in
the sunshine.
The king of the islands was naked in a boat, his loins girded
with his white and blue diadem. He was clad, too, in sky and
greenery like a Caesar's chariot race, and as red-headed as ifhe
were on a pedestal.
We drank to his health in liquors distilled in vegetable
hemispheres.
His function is to preserve for his people the image of their
gods. He was fixing one of these images to the mast of his boat
with three nails, and it was like a triangular sail, or the equilateral
gold of a dried fish brought back from the septentrion. And over
the doorway of his wives' dwelling place he has captured the
ecstasies and contortions of love in a divine cement. Standing apart
from the interlacing of young breasts and rumps, sibyls record

the formula of happiness, which is double: Be amorous, and Be
mysterious.
He possesses also a zither with seven strings of seven colors,
the eternal colors; and, in his palace, a lamp nourished from the
fragrant wellsprings of the earth. When the king sings, moving
along the shore as he plays his zither, or when he prunes with an
axe, from images of living wood, the young shoots which would
disfigure the likeness of the gods, his wives burrow into the hollow
of their beds, the weight of fear heavy upon their loins from the
vigilant gaze of the Spirit of the Dead, and from the perfumed
porcelain of the great lamp's eye.
As the skiff cast off from the reefs, we saw the king's wives
chasing from the island a little legless cripple sprouting green
seaweed like a wizened crab; on his dwarfish trunk a fairground
wrestler's tunic aped the king's nakedness. He pushed himself forward
jerkily with his cestus-covered fists, and with a rumbling from
the casters under his base attempted to pursue and clamber aboard
the platform of the Omnibus de Corinthe, which was just crossing
our route; but such a leap is not within everyone's power. And he
fell miserably short, cracking his posterior lavatory pan with a
fissure less obscene than ludicrous.

18

CONCERNING THE CASTLE-ERRANT
WHICH IS A JUNK

TO GUSTAVE KAHN

Faustroll, his eye on the compass needle, decided that we could
not be very far northeast of Paris. After having first heard the sea's
vertical windowpane, it was not long before we could see it, held
in its place by a fortification of those plants, all root, which are the
sand's skeleton; and we glided onto the smooth reddish beach,
between the viscosity of groynes like parallel leviathans.
The silvered sky offered inverted reflections of the monuments
to be found on the other side of the green sleep of hulls; ships
passed across this sky, upside down and symmetrical toward invisible
futures; then could be seen the image of the still distant
rooftops of the castle of Rhythms.
Indefatigable coxswain that I was, I pulled on the oars for several
hours, while Faustroll sought in vain for a landing place near
the castle, which was receding constantly like a mirage; after passing
through narrow streets of empty houses that spied our
approach through faceted eyes of complicated mirrors, we finally
touched with the sonorous fragility of our prow the flight of steps
in fretworked wood leading to the nomadic edifice.

We hauled the skiff on to the shore, and Bosse-de-Nage
stowed the tackle and treasures in a deep grotto.
"Ha! ha!" he said, but we did not listen to the rest of his
speech.
The palace was a strange junk upon a calm sea quilted with
sand; Faustroll assured me that some of the Atlantides lay beneath.
Seagulls vibrated like the striking hammers of the sky's blue bell,
or the embellishments of a gong's libration.
The lord of the island came forward on foot, leaping across
the garden planted with sand dunes. He had a black beard, and
wore armor of ancient coral; on several fingers he wore silver rings
in which turquoises languished. We drank hollands gin and bitter
beer, between courses of all kinds of smoked meat. The hours were
struck by bells fashioned from all the metals. As soon as the mooring
line had been untied by our laconic deck boy, the castle
crumbled and died and reappeared mirrored in the sky, from very
far away, as a great junk chafing the sand's fire.

19

CONCERNING THE ISLE OF PTYX

TO STEPHANE MALLARME

The isle of Ptyx is fashioned from a single block of the stone of
this name, a priceless stone found only in this island, which is
entirely composed of it. It has the serene translucency of white
sapphire and is the only precious stone not ice-cold to the touch,
for its fire enters and spreads itself like wine after drinking. Other
stones are as cold as the cry of trumpets; this has the precipitated
heat of the surface of kettledrums. It was easy for us to land there,
since it was cut in table-form, and we had the sensation of setting
foot on a sun purged of the opaque or too dazzling aspects of its
flame; as with the torches of olden times. One no longer noticed
the accidents of things but only the substance of the universe, and
this is why we did not care whether the flawless surface was a
liquid equilibrated according to eternal laws, or a diamond, impervious
except under a light falling directly from above.
The lord of the islands came toward us in a ship: the funnel
puffed out blue halos behind his head, magnifying the smoke from
his pipe and imprinting it on the sky. And as the ship pitched and
tossed, his rocking chair jerked out his welcoming gestures.
From beneath his traveling-rug he drew four eggs with painted

shells, which he handed over to Doctor Faustroll after first taking
a drink. In the flame of the punch we were drinking, the hatching
of the oval embryos broke out over the island's shore: two distant
columns, the isolation of two prismatic trinities of Pan pipes,
splayed out in the spurt of their cornices the quadridigitate handshake
of the sonnet's quatrains; and our skiff rocked its hammock
in the newborn reflection of the triumphal arch. Dispersing the
hairy curiosity of the fauns and the rosy bloom of the nymphs
aroused from their reverie by this mellifluous creation, the pale
motor vessel withdrew its blue breath toward the island's horizon,
with its jerking chair waving goodbye. (Since the writing of this book,
the river aroond the island has turned into a runeral wreath.)

20

CONCERNING THE ISLE OF HER,
THE CYCLOPS, AND THE GREAT SWAN
WHICH IS OF CRYSTAL

TO HENRI DE REGNIER

The isle of Her, like the isle of Ptyx, is one single jewel, with outjutting
octagonal fortifications, resembling the basin of a fountain

of jasper. The map gave it the name of the isle of Herm, because
it is pagan and consecrated to Mercury; and the inhabitants called
it the isle of Hart, because of its magnificent gardens. Faustroll
instructed me that one should interpret a name only from its
ancient and authentic root, and that the syllable her, like the root
of a genealogical tree, means, more or less, Seignioral.
The island's surface is of still water, mirror-like (it was natural
that the islands should appear to us as lakes, during our navigation
over dry land); and one cannot imagine a ship sailing through it,
unless in the manner of a ricochet skimming the surface, for this
mirror reflects no ripples, not even its own. Nevertheless, there
sails there a great swan, as pure and simple as a powder puff, and
sometimes it beats its wings without breaking the ambient silence.
When the fluttering of the fan is rapid enough, one can glimpse
the whole island through its transparency, and the fall opens out
like a pavonine19 jet of water.
It has never been known for the gardeners of the isle of Her
to allow the jet of a fountain to fall again into the basin, for this
lVould dull the surface; the bouquets of spray hover at a little height
in horizontal sheets like douds; and the two parallel mirrors of the
earth and the sky preserve their reciprocal emptiness like two magnets
eternally face to face.
Al! conduct in this land is formal, as in olden times when this
word signified customary.

The lord of the island is a Cyclops, but we are not obliged
to imitate the statagems of Ulysses. Before his frontal eye was
hung a forehead-chain enclapsing two silvered mirrors, back to
back in a Janus frame. Faustroll calculated that the double mirror
was exactly 1.5 x 10^-5 centimeters thick. It reflected the light
toward us like the eight-rayed stone of the heraldic serpent. The
lord of the island could, the doctor informed me, discern clearly
through these mirrors those ultraviolet elements hidden from us.
He approached with small steps between a double row of
reeds, cut by his orders according to the erstwhile hierarchy of the
syrinx; his major-domos served us with sugar and with quarters
of citron.
His female retainers, whose dresses spread out like the ocelli
of peacocks' tails, gave us a display of dancing on the glassy lawns
of the island; but when they lifted their trains to walk upon this
sward less glaucous than water, they evoked the image of Balkis,
summoned from Sheba by Solomon, whose donkey's feet were
betrayed by the hall's crystal floor, for at the sight of their
captripede clogs and their fleece skirts we were seized with fright
and flung ourselves into the skiff lying at the foot of the jasper
landing-steps. I pulled on the oars, as Bosse-de-Nage expressed
succinctly the general stupefaction:
"Ha ha!" he said; but his state of fright, no doubt, made him
break off at that point.
And I retreated far from the island, perpendicularly enough

for Faustroll's head to conceal from me in a short while the gaze
of the lord of Her, and the artificial eye in its orbit of mother-of-pearl
resembling the reflecting glass of a semaphore lamp.

21

CONCERNING THE ISLE OF CYRIL

TO MARCEL SCHWOB

The isle of Cyril first appeared to us as the red fire of a volcano,
or as the punch bowl full of blood spattered out by the fall of
shooting stars. Then we saw that it was mobile, armored, and
quadrangular, with a helix at the four corners, shaped like the four
demi-diagonals of separate arms able to advance in any direction.
We realized that we had approached within gun range when a bullet
tore off Bosse-de-Nage's right ear and four of his teeth.
"Ha ha!" stammered the papio; but the impact of a steel cylindrocone
against his left zygomatic apophysis made short work of
his third word. And without awaiting a more detailed reply, the
kinetic island hoisted the skull and kid, and Faustroll the flag of
the Great Strumpot.
After these salutations, the doctor joyfully drank some gin
with Captain Kidd, and managed to dissuade him from setting the

skiff on fire (it was, despite its paraffin varnish, incombustible) and
from hanging Bosse-de-Nage and myself - after robbing us -
from the main yard (the skiff had no main yard).
We all fished for monkeys in a river, to the jaw-gaping horror
of Bosse-de-Nage, and we visited the interior of the island.
Because the red glow of the volcano is blinding, one can soon
see no more than if one were surrounded by a shadowless darkness;
but so that one may follow the opaque undulations of the
dazzling lava, there are children who run about the island with
lamps. They are born and die without ever growing old, in the
hulks of worm-eaten barges, on the bank of a bottle-green backwater.
Lamp shades wander there like glaucous and pink crabs; and
farther inland, whither we escaped as quickly as possible because
of the marine animals which ravage the seashore at ebb tide, their
particolored umbels sleep. The lamps and the volcano exhale a livid
light, like the port-side light of the Boat of the Dead.
After drinking, the captain, resplendent with his curling mustachios,
used his ship-boarding scimitar as a calamus and with an
ink made of gunpowder and gin tattooed upon the forehead of our
close-mouthed cabin boy these words in blue: BOSSE-DE-NAGE,
PAPIO CYNOCEPHALUS, relit his pipe in the lava, and gave orders
to the light-children to escort the skiff down to the sea; and until
we reached the open sea we were accompanied by Kidd's words of
farewell and by the dim lights like lackluster jellyfish.

22

CONCERNING THE GREAT CHURCH
OF SNOUTFIGS

TO LAURENT TAILHADE

We could already hear bells - as loud as all the Brabantine chimes
of ebony, maple, oak, cedar, sorb wood and poplar from Ringing
isle - when I suddenly found myself between two black walls,
beneath an archway, then dazzled by the glare of a long stainedglass
window. The doctor, without deigning to warn me, had shot
the skiff like an arrow, using the tiller's silken cords, into the center
of the great portal of Snoutfigs cathedral. Like the prefatory
cough of chair legs being shifted, my oars grated on the flagstones
of the nave, along which our keel lay symmetrically.
Friar John climbed into the pulpit.
The awesome figure, warlike and sacerdotal, glared at the
assembly. His chasuble was of chain mail, studded with balas
rubies and black diamonds. Instead of rosaries, an olive-wood cithern
dangled on his right hip, while at his left was slung his great
two-handed sword, its hilt fashioned from a golden crescent, in its
scabbard of horned-viper's skin.
His sermon was rhetorical and very Latin, Attic, and Asiatic
at the same time; but I failed to understand why he was clanging

and clinking from his sollerets to his gauntlets, nor could I comprehend
his phrases, arranged like the rounds of a fencing bout.
Suddenly a bronze bullet was fired from a falconet bound to a
counter-faced slab by four iron chains, the shot ploughing open
the orator's right temple and splitting his armet as far as his tonsure,
laying bare the optic nerve and the right lobe of the brain,
but without affecting that stronghold of understanding.
Just as the smoke rose from the falconet, a pungent steam was
exhaled from the throats of the congregation and congealed into
the shape of a squat monster at the foot of the pulpit.
That day, I saw the Snout. It is respectable and wellproportioned,
in every way comparable to the hermit crab or
pagurian, as God is infinitely similar to man. It has horns which
serve it as a nose and as tongue-papillae, shaped like long fingers
issuing from its eyes; two claws of uneven length and ten legs in
all; and being, like the pagurian, vulnerable only in its fundament,
it hides this and its rudimentary sex in a concealed shell.
Friar John drew his great sword, making as if to attack the
Snout, to the clear anxiety of those present. Faustroll remained
impassive and Bosse-de-Nage, inordinately interested, forgot himself
so far as to think visibly:
"Ha ha!"
But he said not a word, for fear of outrunning his thoughts.
The Snout retreated, the point of its shell first, while everyone
drew back; and its claws grated together like stammering

mouths. The sword blade, flashing as it was drawn from its horned-viper's
skin sheath, blunted itself against the creature's hairy
codpiece.
At this point, Faustroll set the skiff in motion. By pulling his
guide ropes harder, he was able to bend the skiff appreciably; this
was possible because his tiller did not simply cQntrol a flat rudder
aft but bent the long keel, from the fore-end, to right, to left,
upward or downward, according to his directional requirements.
And the sail of taut copper glowed like a crescent moon. With
myself manipulating my suction disks to adhere to the granite's
dangerously polished surface, the doctor led me toward the monster.
And in its roundabout route our navigation twisted back on
itself like the wedding ring of an amphisbaena's Narcissus kiss.
By this artifice, Friar John was easily able to meet the Snout
at its own level, the monster having advanced slightly while its
adversary descended the twelve steps. He winkled it from its shell
with the forked tip of his sword, and chopped its fundament into
as many pieces as there were people present in the nave; but neither
he nor we ourselves, except Bosse-de-Nage, wanted to taste
this offering.
And the combat would have been the very image, in all its
vicissitudes, of a bullfight if the bull Shell-Bottom had made a
direct onslaught instead of attempting a thrust at the end of its
circular flight.
However, the bejeweled preacher remounted the pulpit for his

sermon. And his flock, no longer possessed by the Snout's spirit,
were purged of their crass humor and applauded him.
As for us, we departed once more toward the nearby bells of
Ringing isle, and Faustroll did not consult the stars further, for
our way was lit by the beams of the great windows, iridescent as
words, beams like starry paths leading from the church.

23

CONCERNING THE RINGING ISLE

TO CLAUDE TERRASSE

"Happy the sage," says the Chi-Hing, "in the valley where he lives,
a recluse, who delights to hear the sound of cymbals; alone, in his
bed, awakening, he exclaims: Never, I swear, shall I forget the
happiness that I feel!"
The lord of the island, after welcoming us in these terms, led
us to his plantations which were fortified by aeolian marker poles
of bamboo. The commonest plants there were the side-drums, the
ravanastron, sambuca, archlute and bandore, the kin and the tche,
the beggar's-guitar and vina, the magrepha and hydraulus. In a
conservatory there arose the many necks and geyser breath of the
steam-organ given to Pippin in 757 by Constantine Copronymus,

and imported into Ringing isle by Saint Cornelius of Compiegne.
Here one could breathe in the perfume of the piccolo, oboe
d'amore, contrabassoon and sarrusophone, the Brittany bagpipe,
zampogna and English bagpipe; the Bengali chere, bombardon, serpent,
coelophone, saxhorn and anvil.
The temperature of the island is regulated by consulting thermometers
called sirens. At the winter solstice the atmospheric
sonority drops from a eat's cursing to the buzzing of wasps and
bumblebees and the vibration of a fly's wing. At the summer solstice,
all the above-named flowers blossom, reaching a pitch of
overshrill ardor like that of insects hovering over the plants of our
native fields. At night, here, Saturn clashes together his sistrum
and his ring. And, at dawn and twilight, the sun and moon explode
like divorced cymbals.
"Ha, ha," began Bosse-de-Nage, wanting to tryout his voice
before joining in the universal musical refrain; but the two heavenly
bodies clashed together in a kiss of reconciliation and the
planter celebrated this clangorous event thus:
"Happy the sage," he cried, "who, on a mountain slope,
delights to hear the sound of cymbals; alone in his bed on awakening,
he sings: Never, I swear, shall my desires go beyond what I
already possess!"
And Faustroll, before taking leave, drank with him wormwood
distilled on the mountain tops, and the skiff exhaled its chromatic
course at the beat of my oars. Toward the two heavenly bodies

striking the hours of union and division of the black key and the
diurnal key, a little naked child and a white-haired ancient sang on
two lofty columns; toward this double disk of silver and of gold
they sang:

MUSIC

The old man bellowed the selection of foul syllables, and the
seraphic soprano took up the refrain accompanied by the choir of
angels, Thrones, Powers and Dominions: ((... pet, a-mor mor, occu-
pet, cu) pet) a-mor oc-cu, semper nos amor occupet."
The white-bearded energumen concluded the coprolalic phrase
with a throaty cry and an obscene contortion; at this moment, from
our skiff, which was moored at the foot of this chubby and childlike
body's stele, we could see the crumbling of his armor made of
enameled cardboard or puppeteer's pasteboard and the blooming
of the forty-five-year-old sistine dwarfs squalid beard.
From his throne perfumed with harps, the lord of the island
gloried that his creation was good, and as we drew away we could
hear this melody:
"Happy the sage who, on the hill where he dwells, delights to
hear the sound of cymbals; alone in his bed, in awakening, he lies

in tranquillity and swears that he will never reveal to the vulgar the
reason for his joy!"

24

CONCERNING THE HERMETIC SHADES AND
THE KING WHO AWAITED DEATH

TO RACHILDE

After passing the river Ocean, which, as regards the stability of its
surface, much resembles a great street or boulevard, we reached
the land of the Cimmerii and the hermetic Shades, which differ
from this river as two non-liquid planes may differ - that is to say,
in size and in division. The place where the sun sets has the appearance,
between the folds comprising the Town's mesentery, of the
vermiform appendix of a caecum. It abounds in blind alleys and
cuIs-de-sac, some of which expand into caverns. In one of these
the day-star was wont to puff itself up. For the first time I understood
that it was possible to reach the undersurface of the tangible
horizon and see the sun from so close up.
There is a monstrous toad whose mouth is flush with the
Ocean's surface and whose function is to devour the sunken disk,
the way the moon eats the clouds. It genuflects daily in its circular

communion; at this moment steam rises from its nostrils, and the
great flame arises which is the souls of certain people. This is what
Plato called the apportionment by lots of souls outside the pole.
And its genuflection, because of the structure of its limbs, is also
a squatting. The duration of its deglutitory jubilation is therefore
without dimension; and since it digests to the rhythm of a vigorous
punctuality, its intestines remain unconscious of the transitory star
which, in any case, is indigestible. It burrows a passage in the subterranean
diversity of the earth and emerges from the opposite
pole, where it purges itself of the excrements with which it has
soiled itself. It is from this detritus that the devil Plural is born.
In the land where the sun is eternally dormant, there is a king
who is its officer of the guard and due to share its fate, awaiting
death each day; he believes that a night will some time remain
perennial, and inquires after the evacuations of the toad on the
horizon. But he has no time to consider the star hastening, its belly
wobbling, into the adjoining cavern: he carries a mirror on his
navel which gives him a reflection of it. His sole pastime is built
from a house of cards, to which he adds a story each morning;
here, once a month, the lords of the transpontine islands come to
debauch themselves. When the castle is capped with one story too
many the star will flash through it in its course, and that will be a
considerable cataclysm. But the king has been sufficiently judicious
not to build it on the ecliptic plane. And the castle keeps its balance
in exact proportion to its height.

Since evening was descending as Bosse-de-Nage drew our skiff
up on to the bank, the king was awaiting death as usual, and the
toad was gaping functionally. The palace was swathed in blackness;
couches had been prepared for the bodies, and philters to deaden
the consciousness of agony. Bosse-de-Nage, though not professing
it by a thoughtlessly variegated loquacity, prided himself on
being deontological, and thought himself in honor bound to dress
up in a black costume and to crown his skull - which resembled
an ill-favored cucurbit - with a Belgian hat capable of storing up
luminous vibrations in wave lengths equal to those of his costume,
the crown of which resembled half a defunct globe.
And the night computed its hours so exactly that lamps had to
be lit.
Suddenly the toad's descending colon thundered, and the nonalimentary
bolus of pure fire took its usual path once more toward
the pole of the devil Plural.
In a striking metamorphosis the mourning color of the hangings
turned into pale rose. The philters were drunk joyfully
through the reeds of Panpipes, and when little women were laid
out on the red-hot couches, Bosse-de-Nage thought the time had
come to bring matters to a point:
"Ha ha!" he declared in a summary fashion, but he saw that
we had guessed his thoughts, and watched with great surprise the
simplicity of his Belgian hat roll upon the carpet with the recalcitrant
din of an sweep's iron brush.

BOOK FOUR

CEPHALORGY

25

CONCERNING THE LAND-TIDE AND THE
MARINE BISHOP MENDACIOUS

TO PAUL VALERY

FauSlroll took his leave while the night was still hanging, like a
pope, from four of the cardinal points. And as I asked him why he
did not stay drinking until the sun's next sudden plunge, he arose
in the skiff and, with his foot on the neck of Bosse-de-Nage, made
soundings along our route.
He confided to me that he was afraid of being caught unawares
by the ebb tide, since the period of syzygy was nearing its end. And
I was seized with fear, because we were still rowing where there
was no water, between the aridity of the houses, and soon we were

coasting along the pavements of a dusty square. As far as I could
understand, the doctor was talking about the earth's tides, and I
thought that one of us must be drunk, and that the ground was
sinking toward its nadir, like a fathomless depth revealed in a
nightmare. I know now that apart from the flux of its humors and
the diastole and systole which pump its circulatory blood, the earth
is bulging with intercostal muscles and breathes according to the
moon's rhythm. But the regularity of this breathing is very gentle,
and few people are aware of it.
Faustroll took some astral measurements, the visibility through
the albugineous sky over this narrow street being excellent, and
told me to note down the fact that the terrestrial radius had already
shrunk 1.4 x 10^6 centimeters, through the subsidence in the
reflux_ He then gave orders to Bosse-de-Nage to cast anchor,
assuring us that the sole pretext, worthy of his Doctrine, for an
end to our drifting journey was that the thickness of the earth
beneath our feet as far as its center was no longer deep enough to
satisfy our honor.
Now it was midday, the alley's narrow length as deserted as
an empty belly; and we put into port, as it was easy to tell by the
numbers on the wall, in front of the four thousand and fourth
house of the rue de Venise_
Between the ground levels with their floors of beaten earth,
overlooked by doors wider than the street but less agape than
women waiting on the uniformity of their beds, Faustroll raised the

question of berthing the skiff in some deep shelter. Suddenly he
pointed, and I was not very surprised to see arise from the threshold
of one of the barest and most sordid hovels a marine personage
abstracted from book XIII of Aldrovandi's M01lStersj having the
appearance of a bishop, and, more particularly the type of bishop
which was at one time, according to the book, fished up off the
coast of Poland.
His miter was of fish scales and his cross like the corymb of a
reflexed tentacle; his chasuble, which I touched, was all encrusted
with stones from the depths and could easily be lifted up in the
front and at the back, but, because of the chaste adherence of the
cutis, hardly at all above the knees.
The marine bishop Mendacious made an obeisance before
Faustroll, presented to Bosse-de-Nage an ear fig24 gratis, and when
the skiff was intruded into the vaulted berth and the door's valve
closed once more, he presented me to Visited, his daughter, and
to his two sons, Distinguished and Extravagant. Then he inquired
of us whether it would be agreeable to us, quite succinctly, to:

26

DRINK

TO PIERRE QUILLARD

However, Faustroll lifted with his fork toward his teeth five
hams, whole, roasted, and boned, from Strasbourg, Bayonne, the
Ardennes, York and Westphalia, all dripping with Johannisberger;
the bishop's daughter, on her knees under the table, filled once
again each unit of the ascending line of hectoliter cups in the moving
belt which crossed the table in front of the doctor and passed,
empty of its contents, near the raised throne of Bosse-de-Nage. I
gave myself a thirst by swallowing a sheep that had been roasted
alive while racing along a petrol-soaked track until done to a turn.
Distinguished and Extravagant drank as thirstily as anhydrous
sulphuric acid, as their names had made me suspect, and three of
their jowls would have encompassed a cubic meter of firewood.
However, Bishop Mendacious refreshed himself exclusively with
fresh water and rat's piss.
At one time he had been in the habit of mixing this last substance
with bread and Melun cheese, but had succeeded in
suppressing the supererogatory vanity of these solid condiment~.
He sucked in water from a decanter of gold beaten as thin as the
wave length of green light, served on a tray made of the fur (rather

than peltry, since the bishop wanted to be fashionable), of the
freshly flayed fox of a drunkard, in season, and quite equal to a
twentieth of the latter's weight. Such luxury is not vouchsafed to
all: the bishop kept rats at enormous expense, and also, in rooms
paved with funnels, a whole seraglio of drunkards, whose conver~
sation he imitated:
"Do you think," he said to Faustroll, "that a woman can ever
be naked? In what do you recognize the nakedness of a wall?"
"When it is devoid of windows, doors, and other openings,"
opined the doctor.
"Your reasoning is good," continued Mendacious. "Naked
women are never naked, especially old women."
He drank a great draught straight out of his carafe, whose
point of sustentation was erect on its viscous carpet, like a root
torn from its burial place. The catenulate conveyor belt of cups
full of liquid or wind chanted like the incision made III a river's
belly by the rosary of an illuminated towboat.
"Now," continued the bishop, "drink and eat. Visited, serve
us with some lobster!"
"Was it not once fashionable in Paris," I hazarded, "to offer
these animals in courtesy, like a snufrtaker proffering his snuff~
box? But, from what I have heard, people were in the habit of
refusing them, claiming that they were hairy pluripedes and repulsively
dirty. "
"Ho-hum, ho-hum," condescended the bishop. "If lobsters are

dirty and non-depilated, it is perhaps a proof that they are free. A
nobler fate than that of the can of corned beef which you carryon
a ribbon round your neck, doctor navigator, like the case of a pair
of salted binoculars through which you like to scrutinize people
and objects.
"But, listen:

THE LOBSTER AND THE CAN OF CORNED BEEF
WHICH DOCTOR FAUSTROLL
WORE ROUND HIS NECK

Fable

TO A.-F. HEROLD

A can of corned beef, chained like a lorgnette,
Saw a lobster pass by which resembled her fraternally.
He was armored with a hard shell
On which was written that inside, like herself, he was free
of bones,
(Boneless and economical);
And beneath his curved tail
He was probably hiding a key with which to open her.
Lovestricken, the sedentary corned beef
Declared to the little automobile can of living potted meat

That if he would deign to become acclimatized,
By her side, in the world's shopwindows,
He should be decorated with several gold medals,"

"Ha ha," meditated Bosse-de-Nage, but he did not develop
his ideas more comprehensively.
And Faustroll interrupted the frivolity of the conversation with
an important speech.

27

CAPITALLY

Doctor Faustroll commenced:
"I do not believe that an unconscious murder is therefore necessarily
motiveless: it is not governed by any command emanating
from us and has no link with the precedent phenomena of our ego,
but it certainly follows an external order, it is within the order of
external phenomena, and it has a cause that is perceptible by the
senses and is therefore significant.
"I have never had the desire to kill except after seeing a horse's
head, which has become for me a sign, or an order, or more preciselya
signal, like the down-turned thumb in the arena, that the
time has come to strike the blow; and lest you should smile, I shall

explain to you that there are doubtless several reasons for this.
"The sight of a very ugly object certainly provokes one to do
what is ugly. Now, what is ugly is evil. The sight of a revolting
condition incites one to revolting pleasures. The appearance of a
ferocious muzzle with the bones showing impels one to a ferocious
act and the stripping of the bones. Now, there is no object in the
whole world as ugly as the head of a horse, except perhaps that of
the grasshopper, which is almost exactly similar without having the
gigantic size of the former. And you know that the murder of
Christ was foreshadowed by the following fact: that Moses, so that
the Scriptures might be accomplished, had permitted the eating of
the bruchus, the attacus, the ophiomachus and locust, which are
the four species of grasshopper."
"Ha ha!" interposed Bosse-de-Nage by way of digression, but
he could find no valid objection.
"And furthermore," continued Faustroll imperturbably, "the
grasshopper is not altogether a monstrous animal, having normally
developed members, whereas the horse, born for indefinite deformation,
has already, since the origin of its species, although
endowed originally by nature with four feet furnished with fingers,
succeeded in repudiating a certain number of its fingers and
in jumping about on four solitary hooves, exaggerated and horny,
like a piece of furniture sliding on four rollers. The horse is a
planchette.
"But the head alone, although I cannot define my reasons -

perhaps because of the simple enormity of its teeth and the abominable
rictus natural to it - is for me the sign of all ferocity or
rather the sign of death. And the Apocalypse said precisely in
signifying the fourth scourge that: 'Death was mounted upon a
pale horse.' Which I interpret thus: 'those whom Death comes to
visit see first the head of the horse.' And the war's homicides
derive from equitation.
"Now, if you are curious to know why I am rarely incited to
murder in the street, where the horrible head mulciplies in from of
all the vehicles, I would reply that a signal, to be heard, must be
isolated, and that a multitude does not possess the ability to give
an order. And just as a thousand drums do not make as much noise
as a single drum, and a thousand intelligences form a mob moved
by instinct, so an individual is not an individual for me when he
appears in the company of several of his equals, and I maintain that
a head is only a head when separated from its body.
"And Baron Munchausen was never braver at war and better
at killing than on the day when, the portcullis surmounted, he
noticed that he had left half of his mount on the other side of the
sharp girder."
"Ha ha!" exclaimed Bosse-de-Nage appropriately; but Bishop
Mendacious interrupted him to conclude:
"Well, doctor, so long as we never talk with you in the
presence of a decapitated horse - and up to the present time
the solipedes are cut up rather than guillotined - we may be

permitted to consider your murderous temptations as an agreeable
paradox."
Then he sent us to sleep with a macaronic Greek harangue, in
which, tossing my head, I could only make out the last perfect
proposition:

" ...XXXXXXXXXX."

28

CONCERNING THE DEATH OF A NUMBER OF
PEOPLE, AND MORE ESPECIALLY
OF BOSSE-DE-NAGE

TO MONSIEUR DEIBLER, SYHPATHETlCALLY

The little squat mower arrived and started to work. He gave
such strokes with his scythe that he filled a quarter of a wagonful
of hay, or more, so vigorous was he; and what is more,
he took no pleasure in sharpening his scythe; but when its
blade was dulled he drew ic along his teech, with a sound like
fro 0 0 0 0 c. Thus he saved time.
- BEROALDE DE VERVILLE.
HOW TO SUCCEED, XXIV.

After drinking, we took a walk through foggy streets, with
Mendacious in the lead. Since the episcopal nature of his vestments

gave people the impression that he was probably an honest man,
no one except the doctor and myself noticed that he was unhooking
the shop signs with his crosier, as if inadvertently, and giving
them graciously to Bosse-de-Nage to carry, the latter thanking him
with the single word: "ha ha," for, as one knows, he was opposed
to all idle verbiage.
And I was not yet aware of the bishop's charity in allowing the
shop signs to fall down.
Suddenly the crosier's curling head began to uncurl, faced with
the toughness of a gilt moldinglO above a horse-butcher's shop.
The gliding flight hovered as an animal mask and as a twofold gaze
from above and below.
Faustroll, very calm, lit a small perfumed candle which burned
for seven days.
The first day, the flame was red, and revealed the categorical
poison in the air, and the death of all scavengers and soldiers.
The second day, of women.
The third, of small children.
The fourth day, there was a remarkable epizootic disease
among those quadrupeds considered edible on condition that they
were ruminative and possessed a cloven hoof.
The saffron combustion of the fifth day decimated all cuckolds
and bailiff's clerks, but I was of a superior grade.
The blue crackling of the sixth day hastened the impending
end of all bicyclists, of all those at least, without exception, who

fasten their trouser cuffs with lobster claws.
The light changed into smoke on the seventh day, and
Faustroll had a breathing space.
Mendacious unhooked the shop signs with his hands, after asking
for a leg-up from Bosse-de-Nage.
And the fog dissipated weightlessly in centrifugal directions,
before the arch of a riding school's great door; and Faustroll was
overtaken again by insanity.
The bishop took to his heels, but not quickly enough to prevent
Faustroll from tearing off his miter while it was still alive;
whereas I was not molested by the doctor, for I was armored with
my name Panmuphle.
But Faustroll crouched over the baboon, spreading his four
limbs out on the ground and strangling him from behind. Bossede-
N age made a sign that he wished to speak, and, when the
doctor had relaxed the grip of his fingers, said in two words:
"Ha ha!" and these were the last two words he uttered.

29

CONCERNING SOME FURTHER AND MORE
EVIDENT MEANINGS OF THE WORDS "HA HA"

.. And I'll declare
He's mooning up some landscap'd alley where
A ha ha lurks ahead. All unaware
He won't, until he's tumbled, know it's there.
- PIRON

We may properly (feat here of the customary and succinct speech
of Bosse-de-Nage, so that it may be made clear that it is with reasonable
intention and not from mockery that we have always
reported it in its full extent, together with the most probable cause
of its premature interruption.
"HA HA," he said concisely; but we are in no way concerned
with the accidental fact that he usually added nothing more.
In the first instance, it is more judicious to use the
orthography AA, for the aspiration h was never written in the
ancient languages of the world. It proclaimed in Bosse-de-Nage
effort, servile and obligatory labor, and the consciousness of his
inferiority.
A juxtaposed to A, with the former obviously equal to the latter,
is the formula of the principle of identity: a thing is itself. It is
at the same time the most excellent refutation of this very proposition,

since the two A's differ in space, when we write them, if not
indeed in time, just as two twins are never born together - even
when issuing from the obscene hiatus of the mouth of Bosse-de-
Nage.
The first A was perhaps congruent to the second, and we will
therefore willingly write thus: A = A.
Pronounced quickly enough, until the letters become confounded,
it is the idea of unity.
Pronounced slowly, it is the idea of duality, of echo, of distance,
of symmetry, of greatness and duration, of the two
principles of good and evil.
But this duality proves also that the perception of Bosse-de-
Nage was notoriously discontinuous, not to say discontinuous and
analytical, unsuited to all syntheses and to all adequations.
One may confidently assume that he could only perceive space
in two dimensions, and was refractory to the idea of progress,
implying, as it does, a spiral figure.
It would be a complicated problem to study, in addition,
whether the first A was the efficient cause of the second. Let us
content ourselves with noting that since Bosse-de-Nage usually
uttered only AA and nothing more (AAA would be the medical formula
Amalgamate), he had evidently no notion of the Holy Trinity,
nor of all things triple, nor of the undefined, which commences at
three, nor of the indeterminate, nor of the Universe, which may
be defined as the Several.

Nor of anyone else. And, in fact, the day he was married, he
indeed felt that his wife was chaste with him, but he could not tell
whether she was a virgin.
And in his public life he never understood the use, on the
boulevards, of those iron kiosks whose popular name derives from
the fact that they are divided into three triangular prisms and that
one can use only one-third at a time; and he remained, until his
death, branded thus by Captain Kidd:

BOSSE-DE-NAGE
Papio cynocephalus,

befouling and ravaging everything indiscriminately.
We have purposely omitted to say, these meanings being very
well-known, that ha ha is a ditched gap in a wall at the end of a garden
path, an armed pit or military well into which chrome steel
bridges may collapse, and that AA may still be read on the medals
struck at Metz. If Faustroll's skiff had had a bowsprit, ha ha would
have designated a special sail placed beneath the jibs.

BOOK FIVE

OFFICIALLY

30

CONCERNING A THOUSAND VARIED MATTERS

TO PIERRE LOTI

But the bishop, decapitated of his miter, was in a bad way of business,
being unaccustomed to attend to matters nisi in pontificalibus.
For which reason, he entered his closet, victualled with a thousand
varied matters suitable to encourage a crap.
On the little table where ordinarily rolls of paper unfold themselves,
a fat little bust of a jolly little man with a scrubby little beard
paraded in beetle-green.
The jolly little man waddles from right to left on the hemispericity
of his base, and the bishop would have recognized, had he
been a member of the expedition at that time, the sprinting legless

cripple expelled from Fragrant isle. I found out later that he had
met him, at less expense and looking even more like himself, on
the vulgar clock in the sitting room of an old lady. The palmate
legless cripple raised himself up on the artificial heels of his bowl
and offered the bishop courteously a pad of squared paper as an
ahstersive:
"I had reserved it for my mother," he said, "but" (pointing to
the bishop's amethyst), "as is the case with her, the Christian faith
permits you to read with serenity the most somber subjects. You have not
yet made use of my services in this way, but you will see that it is
even more me."
"This paper is then going ... ?" said the bishop.
"Read perseveringly with all your eyes, nay even with your
most secret eye. This paper is sovereign. It would b... you so, if
only you knew!"
"You have decided me," said Mendacious.
"Take your place, then, among these piles of less efficacious
suppositories. It is time: I alone can still distinguish behind nearly all
these accumulated words THE BOTTOMLESS ABYSS."
He jumped nimbly into the designated pit, and like an iron
gauntlet sliding down the banisters of a staircase, the reverberation
of his zinc bowl died away along the double turn of the
depository pipe: but the verses of Messrs. Deroulede and Yan-
Nibor, rolled inside this concave mirlitoll, supported him with
their feet.

Reading by the Bishop
while going about his business.

DEATH OF LATENT OBSCURE

"Brr. .. brr... brr brrr. .. chen ... hatsch ... Latent Obscure
is leaving us. .. Brrr brrr... The moment of agony has been consummated
... brr ... brr ... The momentary oblivion induced by sleep.
A verse. Must she then die Latent Obscure Heuh eheuh ... It
is freezillg hard ... general sillister impression brr brr she is
already halfway into the abyss. . heuh heuh Bitter tears the
doctor says that she will not last the night ... Off with you, frog! down
into the shades below. - Her life is drawing to a close" (Veiled
drum). "The cold bores into olle's bones" (bis). "Tra ratatad" (The
bishop hums joyously.) "In the train of a regiment, our faithful
Melanie, who comes from a stock of devoted old servants, who have
practically become members of the family ... "
"Courage, you are doing fine," cried out the little man from
below. "Carryon, do not be afraid of inconveniencing me: 1 shall
sleep right next door in the Arab room. "
"The bitter struggle of the end, " agreed the bishop, still reading;
"brrr... brrr... agonizing nightmare. Horrible moment. Let us read
with the other side's eye: the last ritual cleansing, the poor corpse, the
horrible little bed, the great bed, the pale forehead, the dear face, this terrible
little bed."

"We rise and descend like ghosts," panted the leaves in their successlve
service.
"These GREEN PALMS," continued the bishop remorselessly,
"placed crosswise on the breast..."
"Thank you for your good wishes," telephoned the inhabitant
of the pipe. "I am delighted to see that you are not leaving us yet,
seated at the top of my chimney. The pale pale winter's day... serene
countenance... supreme image, so pretty!"
"Vague impressions," continued Mendacious modestly.
"The pale features, the gentle smile! Latent Obscure smiles so
softly..."
"Heuh! eheuh... Obsessive impressions, infinitely sad... Brrr...
brr... ratatat!
"The dear voices and the dear sounds. . good smiling eyes, so
sad... "
"LATENT OBSCURE HAS LEFT US!!! thanks be to God,"
exclaimed the bishop, getting up.
"Thanks," echoed the little man. "A warm sun. Open windows.
Big cupboard, tiny box. I am smoking an oriental cigarette!"
"Perhaps this is the last time, " said the bishop sitting down again,
suddenly forced to resume his reading, and reading with extreme
concentration, "that regretfor Latent Obscure welled up in me with that
inten5ity and in that peculiar form which bring5 tean, for all i5 5uddenly
calm, all becomes normal, forgotten, and there is a veil, a mist, an ash,
something indescribable thrown as if in haste, brrrrr ... and suddenly,

of the memory of those beings who have returned to the ETERNAL
NOTHINGNESS, rat, tat, ratatat ... Bounty! bounty! In splashes,
in fire and in blood! After the fashion of the rhinoceros. Without
stopping. T~e rosary for the dead. Brrr. .. brr ... I'm hyplotizing
myself. HO-hu, ho-hu! Long as a lance."
"Is your name Kaka-San?" asked the little man after a certain
while.
"No, Mendacious, marine bishop, at your service. Why?"
"Because Kaka-San did some very dirty things in her box during the
quite pardonable unconstraint of her last hours. "

31

CONCERNING THE MUSICAL JET

"How do they call thee?"
"Chaw-turd," quoth Panurge.
- PANTAGRUEL, III, 25

Now, it is necessary to know that the valve installed at the neck of
tne pit's mouth was of thin rubber; and to be familiar with the discoveries
of Mr. Chichester Bell, cousin of Mr. Graham Bell, the
illustrious inventor of the telephone, one should be aware that a
stream of water falling upon an india-rubber sheet stretched over
the upper end of a tube constitutes a microphone, that a liquid jet

breaks up at certain rates more easily than at others and, according
to its nature, will respond to certain sounds in prefere11ce to others; finally,
one should not be scandalized if we mention that the bishop's loins
secreted this quite unconsciously musical jet whose amplified vibrations
he perceived at the moment of taking leave of his reading.
Voices of little women 
(Sic. The hIsle of Dreams, lyric by Reynaldo Hahn, words by P. Loti, A. Alexandre and G. Hartmann.
[Author's note.])
arose, glorifying the little man.
THE LITTLE WOMEN (piano, common time, three sharps), some
of them GENTLY (E-G-C-E . B-E-B pedal):
"May your grief be soothed by our songs! (F-A ,harp). Others:
May your dire sorrow (G-B ,harp). Flyaway to the low murmur of
the waves (five flat" pedal, CRYSTALLINE) ...
"Stranger (G natural-B), if you would charm our solitude, one
must change your name (GENTLY) whose syllables are too rude,
And give you another (A flat) like the mountain flowers (G sharp, B
natural)· "
Some women propose the name: "Atari." Others: "Fei." The
L.W.: "No! (Pedal. Two quaver-rest,) Lo-ti (B-F, pedal, organ note)."
The L. W.: "Henceforth (ped. ped.) let him be named Lo-ti."
All surrounding him: "It is the moment of baptism! (RATHER
SOLEMNLY). In the land of songs, In the land of loving (crotchet-rest),
Lo-ti (E flat, C, crotchet-rest, cresc.), Lo-: (C) ti (E flat) shall be
your supreme name (SIC)."

THE LITTLE WOMEN (CONT.): "In the land of songs, In the
land of loving, Loti, Loti shall be your supreme name (two crotchet-rest').
Lo-ti (E flat, E flat) we name you, Lo-ti we name you, and (p.
p.) we ble- (ill the key of b flat) -ess you! (Great uproar)."
The valve opened, the music ceased; the aspersion being completed,
the bishop resecured his ring, and laid on hands,
confirming by this approved gesture the benediction of the L.W.
Then he simply cut off the jet.

32

HOW ONE OBTAINED CANVAS

TO PIERRE BONNARD

Faustroll carried out a subfumigation, and the specter of Bosse-de-
Nage - who, having only existed imaginarily, could not really die
- manifested itself, said "ha ha" respectfully, then was silent,
awaiting orders.
I discovered that day a new meaning of this invaluable word,
namely that the alpha, beginning of all things, is interrogative, for it
awaits an exposition in present space, and the appendix, greater
than itself, of a sequence in duration.

"Here are a few billions in cash," said the doctor, rummaging
in his ruby-buttoned waistcoat pockets. "You will ask a policeman
the way to the National Department Store, called Au Luxe
Bourgeois, and there you will buy several ells of canvas.
"You will convey my compliments to the department managers
Bouguereau, Bonnat, Detaille, Henner, J.-P. Laurens and
Tartempion, to their horde of assistants and to the other subsidiary
salesmen. And so as not to waste time in the grip of their haggling,
you will, without a word ... "
"Apart from ha ha," I insinuated maliciously.
" ... Pour over each of them a pile of gold, until their mouths
are silenced beneath its rising tide. A sufficient payment will be
seventy-six million guineas for M. Bouguereau; seventeen thousand
seraphs for M. Henner; eighty thousand maravedi for M.
Bonnat, since his canvas is stamped, in place of a trademark, with
the figure of a poor man; thirty-eight dozen florins for M.J.-P.
Laurens; forty-three centimes for M. Tartempion; and five billion
francs, as well as a tip in kopeks, for M. Detaille. You will throw
the remaining coppers into the faces of the other clowns."
"Ha ha," said Bosse-de-Nage to show that he had understood,
and prepared to depart.
"This is all very well," I said to Faustroll, "but would it not be
more honorable to allocate this gold toward the costs of my proceedings,
and if necessary abstract the quantities of canvas by sheer
cunning?"

"I will explain to you what my gold really is," said the doctor,
winking. And to Bosse.de-Nage:
"One last word: so as to wash the shoptalk out of your prognathous
jaws, enter a small room arranged for this purpose. There
the ikons of the Saints shine forth. Bare your head before the Poor
Fisherman, bow before the Monets, genuflect before the Degas and
the Whistlers, grovel in the presence of Cezanne, prostrate yourself
at the feet of Renoir and lick the sawdust of the spittoons at
the foot of the frame of Olympia!"
"Ha ha," agreed Bosse-de-Nage wholeheartedly, and his
hurried exit carried with it the most ardent protestations of his zeal.
Turning toward me, the doctor continued:
"When Vincent van Gogh had unluted his crucible, and cooled
the integrated matter of the true philosopher's stone, and when,
on this first day of the world, all things were transmuted into the
sovereign metal at the contact of the marvelous become real, the
artisan of the Great Work contented himself with running his
strong fingers through the pointed sumptuousness of his luminous
beard, and said: 'How beautiful is yellow!'
"I could easily transmute al! things, for I also possess this
stone" (he showed it to me, set in one of his rings), "but I have
found by experiment that the benefit extends only to those whose
brain is that selfsame stone" (through a watchglass embedded
in the fontanel of his skull he showed me this stone a second
time) ...

Bosse-de-Nage returned with eleven scenery vans filled with
vertical stacks of unredeemed canvases.
"Do you think, my friend," ended Faustroll, "that one could
possibly give gold to these people which would remain gold and
worthy of being gold in their wallets?
"That same in which they are now submerged will also spread
the well-adjusted streams of its flux over their canvas. It is young
and virgin, in every way comparable to the matter with which
babies beshit themselves."
And after aiming the beneficent lance of the painting machine
at the center of these quadrilaterals dishonored by irregular
colors, he appointed to the control of this mechanical monster
M. Henri Rousseau, artist painter decorator, called the
Customs-officer, mentioned with honor and medal-holder, who
for sixty-three days embellished most painstakingly the impotent
diversity of the grimaces from the National Department Store with
the uniform stillness of chaos.

BOOK SIX

A VISIT TO LUCULLUS

33

CONCERNING THE TERMES

Now, Faustroll was sleeping next to Visited.
The great bed, carved out by knife, squatted upon the nakedness
of the earth, that ancient part of the world's nebula, and
poured upon the ground the worm-eaten hours of its sand.
Amid this rhythmical silence, Visited desired to discover
whether, underneath the spiral-painted tapestry, Faustroll, who had
loved her like the infinite series of numbers, possessed a heart
capable of pumping out with its open and closed fist the projection
of circling blood.
The watch's tick-tock, like the scratching on a table of a fingernail,
a pen nib or a nail, beat near her ear. She counted nine
strokes; the pulsation stopped, then continued up to eleven ...

The bishop's daughter heard her own sleep before any further
beats, and these did not disturb her, for she did not survive the frequency
of Priapus.
On the oak of the decrepit bed, the tcrmes, comparable to the
invisibility of a red louse with yellow eyes, lent the isochronism of
the throbbing of its head to the simulation of Faustroll's heart.

34

CLINAMEN

TO PAUL FORT

... Meanwhile, after there was no one left in the world, the
Painting Machine, animated inside by a system of weightless
springs, revolved in azimuth in the iron hall of the Palace of
Machines, the only monument standing in a deserted and razed
Paris; like a spinning top, it dashed itself against the pillars, swayed
and veered in infinitely varied directions, and followed its own
whim in blowing onto the walls' canvas the succession of primary
colors ranged according to the tubes of its stomach, like a poussel'amour
in a bar, the lighter colors nearest to the surface. In the
sealed palace which alone ruffled this dead smoothness, this modern

deluge of the universal Seine, the unforeseen beast Clinamen
ejaculated onto the walls of its universe:

NEBUCHADNEZZAR CHANGED INTO BEAST
What a beautiful sunset! or rather it is the moon, like a porthole
in a hogshead of wine greater than a ship, or like the oily stopper
of an Italian flask. The sky is a sulphurous gold so red that there
is really nothing missing but a bird five hundred meters high capable
of wafting us a breeze from the clouds. The architecture, the
very type of all these flames, is most lively and even rather moving,
but too romantic! There are towers with eyes and beaks and
turrets capped like little policemen. Two watching women sway at
the wind-swept windows like drying straitjackets. Thus the bird:
The great Angel, who is not angel but Principality, swoops
down, after a flight exactly as black as a martin's, the color of
the metal of a roofer's anvil. With one point on the roof, the
compasses close and open up again, describing a circle around
Nebuchadnezzar. One arm chants the metamorphosis. The king's
hair does not stand on end, but droops like a walrus's wet whiskers;
the pointed ends of his hair make no effort to squeeze shut the
sensitive pimples which people this limp seaweed with zoophytes
reflecting all the stars: tiny wings flutter to the rhythm of a toad's
webbed feet. Pitiful pleas swim up against the stream of tears. The
eyes' sorrowful pupils, in their ascent, crawl toward the knees of

the wine-lees colored sky. but the angel has enchained the newborn
monster in the blood of the vitreolls palace and thrown him into
the bottom of a bottle.

THE RIVER AND THE MEADOW
The river has a fat, soft face for the smack of oars, a neck with
many wrinkles, a blue skin with green downy hair. Between its
arms, pressed to its heart, it holds the little Island shaped like a
chrysalis. The Meadow in its green gown is asleep, its head in the
hollow of its shoulder and neck.

TOW ARD THE CROSS
At one end of the Infinite, in the form of a rectangle, is the white
cross where the demons have been executed together with the
unrepentant Thief. There is a barrier around the rectangle, white,
with five-pointed stars studding the bars. Down the rectangle's
diagonal comes the angel, praying calm and white like the wave's
foam. And the horned fish, a monkey trick of the divine Ichthys,
surge back toward the cross driven through the Dragon, who is
green except for the pink of his bifid tongue. A blood-covered
creature with hair standing on end and lenticular eyes is coiled
around the tree. A green Pierrot rushes up, weaving from side to
side and turning cartwheels. And all the devils, in the shape of
mandrills or clowns, spread their caudal fins out wide like acrobats'
legs, and, imploring the inexorable angel (Woan't yew p'-lay

with me) mistuh Loyal?),  plod toward the Passion, shaking their
clowns' straw wigs encrusted with sea·salt.

GOD FORBIDS AOAM AND EVE TO TOUCH THE TREE OF
GOOD AND EVIL. THE ANGEL LUCIFER RUNS AWAY
God is young and gentle, wirh a rosy halo. His robe is blue and his
gestures sweeping. The tree's base is twisted and its leaves aslant.
The other trees are doing nothing apart from being green. Adam
adores and looks to see if Eve also adores. They are on their knees.
The angel Lucifer, old and looking like tim.c and like the old man
of the sea lapidated by Sinbad, plunges with his gilded horns
toward the lateral ether.

LOVE
The soul is wheedled by Love who looks exactly like an iridescent
veil and assumes the masked face of a chrysalis. It walks upon
inverted skulls. Behind the wall where it hides, claws brandish
weapons. It is baptized with poison. Ancient monsters, the wall's
substance, laugh into their green beards. The heart remains red
and blue, violet in the artificial absence of the iridescent veil that it
is weaving.

THE CLOWN
His round hump hides the world's roundness, as his red cheek
rends the lions on the tapestry. Clubs and diamonds are embroidered
on the crimson silk of his garments, and toward the sun and
the grass he makes a benedictory aspersion with his tinkling
aspergillum.

"FARTHER! FARTHER!" CRIES GOD TO THE MEEK
The mountain is red, the sun and the sky are red. A finger points
toward its peak. The rocks surge upward, the absolute summit lost
to view. The bodies of those who have"not reacl1edltcome-tumbling
down again head first. One falls backwards on to his hands,
dropping his guitar. Another waits with his back to the mountain,
near his bottles. One lies down on the road, his eyes still climbing.
The finger still points, and the sun waits for obedience before it
will set.

FEAR CREATES SILENCE
Nothing is terrifying, if it be not a widowed gallows, a bridge with
dry piers, and a shadow which is content to 6e black. Fear, turning
away its head, keeps its eyelids lowered and the lips of the stone
mask closed.

IN THE NETHER REGIONS
The fire of the nether regions is of liquid blood, and one can see
down to the very depths. The heads of suffering have sunk down,
and an arm is raised from each body like a tree from the sea bed,
stretched to where the fire is abated. There, a serpent darts his

venom. All this blood is aflame and held within the rock whence
people are hurled. And there is a red angel for whom one single
gesture suffices, which signifies: FROM TOP TO BOTTOM.

FROM BETHLEHEM TO THE GARDEN OF OLIVES
It is a little red star, above the crib of the Mother and Child, and
above the ass's cross. The sky is blue. The little star becomes a
halo. God has lifted the weight of the cross from the animal and
carries it on his brand new man's shoulder. The black cross
becomes rose, the blue sky turns violet. The road is as straight and
white as the arm of one crucified
Alas! the cross has become bright red. It is a blade steeped in
blood from the wound. -Ab-ove_the body, at the end of the road's
arm, are eyes and a beard which bleed also, and above his image in
the wooden mirror, Christ spells out: J-N-R-I.

JUST A WITCH
Her hump to the rear, belly to the fore, neck twisted, hair whistling
in the flight of the broomstick with which she has transfixed herself,
she goes under the claws, vegetation of the bright red sky,
and the index of the road to the Devil.

EMERGING FROM HIS BLISS, GOD CREATES THE WORLDS
God arises haloed by a blue pentagram, blesses and sows and
makes the sky bluer. Fire glows red from the idea of ascension,

and the gold of the stars mirrors the halo. The suns are great fourleaved
clovers, in bloom, like the cross. And the only thing not
created is the white robe of Form itself.

THE DOCTORS AND THE LOVER
In the bed, calm as a green sea, there is a floating of outstretched
arms, or rather these are not the arms but the two divisions of the
head of hair, vegetating upon the dead man. And the cenrer of this
head of hair curves like a dome and undulates like the movement
of a leech. Faces, mushrooms bloated with rottenness, spring up
evenly and red in the windowpanes of agony. The first doctor, a
larger orb behind this dome, trapezoidal in character, becomes
slit-eyed and decks his cheeks with bunting. The second rejoices
in the external equilibrium of spectacles, twin spheres, and weighs
his diagnostic in the lib ration of dumbbells. The third old man
veils himself with the white wing of his hair and announces desperately
that beauty returns to the skull by polishing his own. The
fourth, without understanding, watches ... the lover who, against
the current of the stream of tears, sails in pursuit of the soul, his
eyebrows joined upward by their inner points in the shape of cranes
in flight, or the communion of the two palms of one praying or
swimming, in the attitude of daily devotion called by the Brahmins
KHURMOOKUM.

BOOK SEVEN

KHURMOOKUM

(The Sundhya, or the daily Prayers of the Brahmins).

35

CONCERNING THE GREAT SHIP
MOUR-DE-ZENCILE

The sieve, which would have burst into flames like a puerile resin
in the city quietly consumed by fire and death, reared up the head
of its prow under the pull of Faustroll's tiller, and its gesture was
the opposite of the charitable crosier of Mendacious.
The meshed base, unsinkable because of its oily coating,
rested upon the waves' denticulation like a sturgeon upon several
harpoons, and beneath it was a keyboard of water and air alternately.
The disappearance preceding the apparition of the corpses
of the seven day's murder squinted toward us from the other side
of the reticular bars protecting us.

The toad from rhe isle of Shades snapped up the sun for
its supper, and the water was night. That is to say, the banks disappeared
and the sky and the river became comparable and
undifferentiated, and the skiff became the pupil of a great eye, or
a stationary balloon, with a dizziness to left and to right whose
feathers I was ordered to stroke with my two oars.
Immobile barrels stemmed the current at express speed, rolled
into balls.
And to escape these things, as one seeks refuge under one's
bedclothes in the once-and-for-all blackness, Faustroll maneuvered
the skiff into an aqueduct six hundred meters wide along which the
canal barges were vomited into the river.

(Here ends the narrative of Panmuphle)

The great ship Mour-de-Zencle, which means Horse-muzzlebearing-
scythe- shaped-patches, loomed up on the immediate
horizon like a black sun, having the appearance under the bright
arch at the tunnel's end of an eye without its leather blinker,
approaching the fixity of its own painted pupils, green in a yellow
iris. On the invisible towpath, like a ledge on the vault's brink,
clopped the front horseshoes of the file of four animals bearing the
sign of death, treading awkwardly with their hooves.
With his topaz-beringed forefinger, moistened in his mouth,
Faustroll scraped the paraffin from the bottom of the boat. The

artesian well (hell was in Artois that day) swirled hissing around
their feet, with a noise opposite to the deglutition of an emptying
bathtub. The sieve rocked in its last pulsation. The penultimate
and the last meshes where the water wove its barnacles and let
its double hymen be violated by anti-peristaltic tongues, were
named the mouths of Panmuphle and Faustroll. The copper shuttle
glittering wirh irs setting of air bubbles, and the jaws exhaling
the breath from their bones, imitated coins falling in water or
the water spider's nest. Faustroll, procuring fresh canvas in the
name of God, steeped in the painting machine's lustral water a
different sky to that of Tyndall,'o then joined his palms in an attitude
of praying or swimming, in the manner of daily devotion
called Khurmookum by the Brahmins. The great ship Mour-de-
Zencle passed like a black iron over an ironing board; and the
echo of the sixteen horny fingers of the preterite horses whispered
KHURMOOKUM beneath the vault's exit, fading away with the soul.
Thus did Doctor Faustroll make the gesture of dying, at the
age of sixty-three.

36

CONCERNING THE LINE

The bishop reads the letter from God

TO FELIX FENEON

In the manuscript, of which Panmuphle, interrupted by the
monotonous prolixity of the baboon, could only decipher the prolegomena,
Faustroll had noted a small fragment of the Beautiful
that he knew, and a small fragment of the True that he knew, during
the syzygy of words; and one could have reconstructed,
through this facet, all art and all science, which is to say All; but
can one tell if All is a regular crystal, rather than more probably
a monster (Faustroll defined the universe as that which is the
exception to oneself)?
Thus cogitated the marine bishop as he swam over the shipwreck
of the mechanical boat, over the sunken quintessential
works, over the carcass of Panmuphle and the body of Faustroll.
However, he remembered that, following the proposition of
the learned Professor Cayley, a single curve drawn in chalk on a
blackboard two and a half meters long can detail all the atmospheres
of a season, all the cases of an epidemic, all the haggling of
the hosiers of every town, the phrases and pitches of all the sounds

of all the instruments and of all the voices of a hundred singers and
two hundred musicians, together with the phases, according to the
position of each listener or participant, which the ear is unable to
seize.
And behold, the wallpaper of Faustroll's body was unrolled by
the saliva and teeth of the water.
Like a musical score, all art and aU science were written in the
curves of the limbs of the ulrrasexagenarian ephebe, and their
progression to an infinite degree was prophesied therein. For, just
as Professor Cayley recorded the past in the two dimensions of a
black surface, so the progress of the solid future entwined the body
in spirals. The Morgue harbored for twO days on its slab" the
book revealed by God concerning the glorious truth spread out
through the three (four or n for some people) directions of space.
Meanwhile, Faustroll, finding his soul to be abstract and
naked, donned the realm of the unknown dimension.

BOOK EIGHT

ETHERNITY

TO LOUIS DUMUR

Leves gustus ad philosophiam movere fortasse ad atheismus,
sed pleniores haustus ad religionem reducere.
- FRANCIS BACON

37

CONCERNING THE MEASURING ROD,
THE WATCH AND THE TUNING FORK

Telepathic letter from Dotor Faustroll to Lord Kelvin

"My dear colleague,
"It is a long time since I have sent you news of myself; but I
do not think you will have imagined that I was dead. Death is only
for common people. It is a fact, nevertheless, that I am no longer
on earth. Where I am I have only discovered a very shorr time ago.
For we are both of the opinion that, if one can measure what one
is talking about and express it in numbers, which constitute the

sole reality, then one has some knowledge of one's subject. Now,
up to the present moment I knew myself to be elsewhere than on
earth, in the same way that I know that quartz is situated elsewhere,
in the realm of hardness, and less honorably so, than the
ruby; the ruby elsewhere than the diamond; the diamond than the
posterior callosities of Bosse-de-Nage; and their thirty-two skinfolds
- more numerous than his teeth, if one includes the wisdom
teeth - than the prose of Latent Obscure.
"But was I elsewhere in terms of date or of position, before or
to the side, after or nearer? I was in that place where one finds
oneself after having left time and space: the infinite eternal, Sir.
"It was natural that, having lost my books, my skiff of metallic
cloth, the society of Bosse-de-Nage and Monsieur Rene-Isidore.
Panmuphle, bailiff, my senses, the earth, and those two old Kantian
aspects of thought, I should suffer the same anguish of isolation as
a residual molecule several centimeters distant from the others in
a good modern vacuum of Messrs. Tait and Dewar. And, even
then, perhaps the molecule knows that it is several centimeters
away! For one single centimeter, the only valid sign for me of
space, being measurable and a means of measuring, and for the
mean solar second, in terms of wnich the heart of my terrestrial
body beat - for these things I would have given my soul, Sir,
despite the usefulness to me of this commodity in informing you of
these curiosities.
"The body is a more necessary vehicle because It supports

one's clothes, and through clothes one's pockets. I had left in one
of my pockets by mistake my centimeter, an authentic copy in
brass of the traditional standard, more portable than the earth or
even the terrestrial quadrant, which permits the wandering and
posthumous souls of interplanetary savants to concern themselves
no further with this old globe, nor even with C.G.S., as far as
measurements of size are concerned, thanks to MM. Mechain and
Delambre.
"As for my mean solar second, were I to have remained on the
earth I still could not have been certain of retaining it safely and
of being able to measure time validly through its medium.
"If in the course of a few million years I have not terminated
my pataphysical studies, it is certain that the period of the earth's
rotation around its axis and of its revolution around the sun will
both be very different from what they are now. A good watch,
which I would have had running all this time, would have cost me
an exorbitant price, and, in any case, I do not perform secular
experiments, have nothing but contempt for continuity, and consider
it more esthetic to keep Time itself in my pocket, or the unity
of time, which is its snapshot.
"For these reasons, I possessed a vibrator better arranged for
permanence and for absolute accuracy than the hairspring of a
chronometer, one whose period of vibration would have retained
the same value over a certain number of million years with an error
of less than 1:1,000. A tuning fork. Its period had been carefully

determined, before I embarked in the skiff, according to your
instructions, by our colleague Professor Macleod, in terms of
mean solar seconds, with the prongs of the tuning fork being
pointed successively upward, downward and toward the horizon, in
order to eliminate the least effect of terrestrial gravity.
"I no longer had even my tuning fork. Imagine the perplexity
of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, and his
measuring rod, and his tuning fork. I believe, Sir, that it is indeed
this state which constitutes death.
"But I suddenly remembered your teachings and my own
previous experiments. Since I was simply NOWHERE, or SOMEWHERE,
which is the same thing, I found a substance with which
to make a piece of glass, having met various demons, including the
Sorting Demon of Maxwell, who succeeded in grouping particular
types of movement in one continuous widespread liquid (what
you call small elastic solids or molecules): a substance as plentiful
as one could desire, in the shape of silicate of aluminum. I have
engraved the lines and lit the two candles, albeit with a little time
"and perseverance, having had to work without even the aid of flint
implements. I have seen the two rows of spectrums, and the yellow
spectrum has returned my centimeter to me by virtue of the figure
5.892 x 10^-5.
"Now that we are happy and comfortable, and on dry land
as is my atavistic habit, since I carryon me the one thousand
millionth part of a quarter of the earth's circumference, which is

more honorable than being attached to the surface of the globe by
attraction, permit me, I pray, to note a few impressions for you.
"Eternity appears to me in the image of an immobile ether,
which consequently is not luminiferous. I would describe luminiferous
ether as circularly mobile and perishable. And I deduce from
Aristotle (Treatise on the Heavens) that it is appropriate to write
ETHERNITY.
"Luminiferous ether together with all material particles, which
I can easily distinguish - my astral body having good pataphysical
eyes - possesses the form, at first sight, of a system of rigid
links joined together, and having rapidly rotating flywheels pivoted
on some of the links. Thus it fulfils exactly the mathematical
ideal worked out by Navier, Poisson, and Cauchy. Furthermore,
it constitutes an elastic solid capable of determining the magnetic
rotation of the plane of polarization of light discovered by Faraday.
At my posthumous leisure I shall arrange it to have zero moment
of momentum as a whole and to reduce it to the state of a mere
spring balance.
"Moreover, I am of the opinion that one could reduce considerably
the complexity of this spring balance or this luminiferous
ether by substituting for the linked gyros tats various systems of
circulation of liquids of infinite volume through perforations in
infinitely small solids.
"It will lose none of its qualities as a result of these modifications.
Ether has always appeared to me, to the rouch, to be as

elastic as jelly and yielding under pressure like Scottish shoemakers'
wax."

38

CONCERNING THE SUN AS A COOL SOLID

Second letter to Lord Kelvin

"The sun is a cool, solid, and homogeneous globe. Its surface is
divided into squares of one meter, which are the bases of long,
inverted pyramids, thread-cut, 696,999 kilometers long, their
points one kilometer from the center. Each is mounted on a screw
and its movement toward the center would cause, if I had the time,
the rotation of a paddle at the top end of each screw shaft, in a
few meters of viscous fluid, with which the whole surface is thinly
covered...
"I was quite disinterested in this mechanical spectacle, not having
found again my mean solar second and being distraught at the
loss of my tuning fork. But I took a piece of brass and fashioned a
wheel in which I cut two thousand teeth, copying everything which
Monsieur Fizeau, Lord Rayleigh, and Mrs. Sidgwick had achieved
in similar circumstances.
"Suddenly, the second was rediscovered in the absolute

measure of 9,413 kilometers per mean solar second of the Siemens
unit, and the pyramids, forced to descend on their threads since
they found themselves, like myself, in the movement of time, were
obliged to come into equilibrium, in order to remain stable, by borrowing
a sufficient quantity of Sir Humphry Davy's repulsive
motion; and the fixed matter, the screw shafts and the screw nuts
disappeared. The sun became viscous and began to turn on its axis
in twenty-five-day cycles; in a few years you will see sunspots on it,
and a few quarter-centuries will determine their periods. Soon, in
its great age, it will shrink in a diminution of three-quarters.
"And now I am being initiated into the science of all things
(you will receive three new fragments from two of my forthcoming
books), having reconquered all perception, which consists in duration
and size. I understand that the weight of my brass wheel,
which I clasp between the hebetude of the abstract fingers of my
astral body, is the fourth power of eight meters per hour; I hope,
deprived of my senses, to recognize color, temperature, taste, and
various qualities other than the six,59 in the actual number of revolutions
per second...
"Farewell: I can glimpse already, perpendicularly to the sun,
the cross with a blue center, the red brushes toward the nadir and
the zenith, and the horizontal gold of foxes' tails."

39

ACCORDING TO IBICRATES THE GEOMETER

(Little sketches on Pataphysics after Ibicrates the Geometer and his divine teacher
Sophrolatos the Armenian, translated and brought to light by Doctor Faustroll.)

I

Fragment of the Dialogue upon the Erotic

MATHETES
Tell me, o Ibicrates, thou whom we have named the Geometer
because thou knowest all things by the means of lines drawn in
different directions, and hast given us the veritable portrait of three
persons of God in three escutcheons which are the quart essence
of Tarot symbols, the second being barred with bastardy and the
fourth revealing the distinction and evil engraved in the wood of the
tree of knowledge, I hope most ardently, if it pleaseth thee, to
know thy thoughts upon love, thou who hast deciphered the imperishable
because unknown fragments, inscribed in red on sulphurous
papyrus, of the Pataphysics of Sophrotatos the Armenian. Answer,
I pray thee, for I shall question thee, and thou wilt instruct me.

IBICRATES
That at least is exactly true, 0 Mathetes. Then speak, therefore.

MATHETES
Before all else, having noticed how all the philosophers have incarnated
love in beings and have expressed it in different symbols
of contingency, instruct me, 0 Ibicrates, in the eternal significance
of these.

IBICRATES
The Greek poets, o Mathetes, corbeled the forehead of Eros with
a horizontal bandelet, which is the bend or fess of the blazon, and
the sign Minus of those who study mathematics. And Eros being
the son of Aphrodite, his hereditary arms were ostentative of
woman. And contradictorily Egypt erected its steles and obelisks
perpendicularly to the cruciferous horizon, thus creating the sign
Plus, which is male. The juxtaposition of the two signs of the
binary and the ternary gives the shape of the letter H, which is
Chronos, father of Time or Life, and thus embraces mankind. For
the Geometer, these two signs cancel each other out or impregnate
each other, and there results simply their progeny, which
becomes egg or zero, all the more identical because they are contrary.
And in the matter of the dispute between the sign Plus and
the sign Minus, the Reverend Father Ubu, of the Society of Jesus,
ex-king of Poland, has written a great tome entitled Caesar-Antichrist,
in which is to be found the sole practical demonstration
of the identity of opposites, by means of the mechanical device
called physick-stick.

MATHETES
Is this possible, o Ibicrates?

IBICRATES
Absolutely indeed, veritably. And the third abstract sign of the
tarots, according to Sophrotatos the Armenian, is what we call the
Club, which is the Holy Ghost in his four directions, the two
wings, the tail, and the head of the bird; or, reversed, Lucifer erect
horned with his belly and his twO wings, like the medicinal cuttlefish;
more particularly, at least, when one eliminates from the latter
object all negative - that is to say, horizontal - lines; or, thirdly,
it represents the Tau or the cross, emblem of the religion of charity
and love; or, finally, the phallus which is dactylic ally triple, in
truth, o Mathetes

MATHETES
Then to some extent in our temples today, love may still be considered
to be God, although, I agree, in somewhat abstruse forms,
o Ibicrates?

IBICRATES
The tetragon of Sophrotatos, contemplating itself, inscribes within
itself another tetragon half as great as itself, and evil is the symmetrical
and necessary reflection of good, these being the unity of
two ideas, or the idea of the number two; good, in consequence,

to a certain degree, indeed, I believe, or indifferent at the very
least, o Mathetes. The tetragon, being hermaphroditic, engenders
God by interior intuition, while Evil, likewise hermaphroditic,
engenders parturition...

40

PANTAPHYSICS AND CATACHEMY

II

Further fragment

God transcendent is trigonal and the soul transcendent theogonal,
consequently trigonal also.
God immanent is trihedral and the soul immanent equally
trihedral.

There are three souls (cf. Plato).
Man is tetrahedral because his souls are not independent,
Therefore he is a solid, and God is spirit.
If souls are independent, man is God (MORAL SCIENCE).
Dialogue between the three thirds of the number three.
MAN: The three persons are the three souls of God.
DEUS: Tres animae sunt tres personae hominis.
TOGETHER: Homo est Deus

41

CONCERNING THE SURFACE OF GOD

God is, by definition, without dimension; it is permissible, however,
for the clarity of our exposition, and though he possesses no
dimensions, to endow him with any number of them greater than
zero, if these dimensions vanish on both sides of our identities. We
shall content ourselves with two dimensions, so that these flat geometrical
signs may easily be written down on a sheet of paper.
Symbolically God is signified by a triangle, but the three
Persons should not be regarded as being either its angles or its
sides. They are the three apexes of another equilateral triangle circumscribed
around the traditional one. This hypothesis conforms
to the revelations of Anna Katherina Emmerick, rwho saw the__ cross
(which we may consider to be the symbol of the V rb of G~ in the
form of a Y, a fact which she explains only by the physical reason
that no arm of human length could be outstretched far enough to
reach the nails of the branches of a Tau.
Therefore, POSTULATE:
Until we are furnished with more ample information and for
greater ease in our provisional estimates, let us suppose God to
have the shape and symbolic appearance of three equal straight
lines of length a, emanating from the same point and having
between them angles of 120 degrees. From the space enclosed

between these lines, or from the triangle obtained by joining the
three farthest points of these straight lines, we propose to calcu4
late the surface.
Let x be the median extension of one of the Persons a, 2y the
side of the triangle to which it is perpendicular, N and P the extensions
of the straight line (a+x) in both directions ad infinitum.

Thus we have:

x = infinity - N - a - P.

But

N = infinity - 0

and

P = 0.

Therefore

x = infinity - (infinity - 0) - a - 0 = infinity - infinity + 0 - a - 0

x = - a.

In another respect, the right triangle whose sides are a, x, and
y give us

a^2 = x^2 + y^2

By substituting for x its value of (-a) one arrives at

a^2 = (-a)^2 + y^2 = a^2 + y^2.

Whence

y^2 = a^2 - a^2 = 0

and

y root(0).

Therefore the surface of the equilateral triangle having for
bisectors of its angles the three straight lines a will be

S = y (x + a) = root(0)(-a +a)

S = 0 root(0).

COROLLARY: At first consideration of the radical root(0), we can
affirm that the surface calculated is one line at the most; in the second
place, if we construct the figure according to the values obtained
for x and y, we can determine:
That the straight line 2y, which we now know to be 2 root(0), has
its point or intersection on one of the straight lines a in the opposite
direction to that of our first hypothesis, since x = - a; also,
that the base of our triangle coincides with its apex;
That the two straight lines a make, together with the first one,

angles at least smaller than 60°, and what is more can only attain
2 root(0) by coinciding with the first straight line a.
Which conforms to the dogma of the equivalence of the three
Persons between themselves and in their totality.
We can say that a is a straight line connecting 0 and infinity, and
can define God thus:

DEFINITION: God is the shortest distance between zero and
infinity.

In which direction? one may ask.
We shall reply that His first name is not Jack, but Plus-and-
Minus. And one should say:

± God is the shortest distance between 0 and infinity, in either direction.

Which conforms to the belief in the two principles; but it is
more correct to attribute the sign + to that of the subject's faith.
But God being without dimension is not a line.
- Let us note, in fact, that, according to the formula

infinity - 0 - a + a + 0 = infinity

the length a is nil, so that a is not a line but a point.
Therefore, definitively:

GOD IS THE TANGENTIAL POINT BETWEEN ZERO AND
INFINITY. Pataphysics is the science...