The Revolt of the Angels quotes

Today the masses believe nothing. The middle classes wish to believe, and succeed at times, as did Marc and René d’Esparvieu. Their brother Gaétan, on the contrary, the country gentleman, failed to attain to faith.

He was an agnostic, a term commonly employed by the modish to avoid the odious one of freethinker.

And he openly declared himself an agnostic, contrary to the admirable custom which deems it better to withhold the avowal.

The young man thus gained a freedom which enabled him to endure family life. He was rather good-looking, smart without too much pretence, and the faint smile which merely raised one corner of his mouth did not lack charm.

At twenty-five Maurice possessed the wisdom of Ecclesiastes.

Doubting whether a man hath any profit of all his labour which he taketh under the sun he never put himself out about anything.

all the Fathers of the Church, the Apologists and the Decretalists, all the Humanists of the Renaissance, all the Encylopaedists, the whole world of philosophy and science. Therefore it was that Cardinal Merlin, when he deigned to visit it, remarked:

“There is no man whose brain is equal to containing all the knowledge which is piled upon these shelves. Happily it doesn’t matter.”

Monseigneur Cachepot, who worked there often when a curate in Paris, was in the habit of saying:

This book bore the label R>3214VIII/2.

And this painful truth was suddenly borne in upon the mind of Monsieur Sariette: to wit, that the most scientific system of numbering will not help to find a book if the book is no longer in its place.

Every day of the ensuing month found the table littered with books. Greek and Latin lay cheek by jowl with Hebrew. Monsieur Sariette asked himself whether these nocturnal flittings were the work of evildoers who entered by the skylights to steal valuable and precious volumes.

“How,” she asked Abbé Lapetite, “do you explain the scourges that afflict mankind? Why are there plagues, famines, floods, and earthquakes?”

“It is surely necessary that God should sometimes remind us of his existence,” replied Abbé Lapetite, with a heavenly smile.

Maurice appeared keenly interested in this conversation. Then he seemed fascinated by Madame Fillot-Grandin, quite a personable young woman, whose simple innocence, however, detracted all piquancy from her beauty, all savour from her bodily charms.

“I am an angel,” replied the voice.

“I am an angel. I am Maurice’s guardian angel.”

“Say it again. I am going mad. I do not understand. …”

“Do you not know that the sons of God have already revolted and that a great battle took place in the heavens?”

“That was a long time ago,” said Maurice, putting on his socks.

“It was before the creation of the world. But nothing has changed since then in the heavens. The nature of the Angels is no different now from what it was originally. What they did then they could do again now.”

“You know Hebrew, then?” exclaimed Maurice.

“Hebrew is my native tongue: in Paradise for a long time we have spoken nothing else.”

“Ah, you are a Jew. I might have deduced it from your want of tact.”

“Hebrew is my native tongue: in Paradise for a long time we have spoken nothing else.”

“Ah, you are a Jew. I might have deduced it from your want of tact.”

The Angel, not deigning to hear, continued in his melodious voice: “I have delved deep into Oriental antiquities and also into those of Greece and Rome. I have devoured the works of theologians, philosophers, physicists, geologists, and naturalists. I have learnt. I have thought.

But when the Angel had passed through the door, and all that was to be seen of him in the doorway was his uplifted heel, Maurice called him back.

“Arcade! I never thought of it! I have no guardian angel now!”

“Quite true, Maurice, you have one no longer.”

And he dabbed his reddened eyes. He stood awhile, overcome by silent emotion. Then, holding the candle near the long pinions which were moulting their down in places, he murmured, “They are eaten away.”

“You must put some pepper on them,” said Arcade.

“I have done so,” replied the angelic musician, sighing. “I have put pepper, camphor, and powder on them. But nothing does any good.”

… greeted his brother Arcade cordially, approved of his rupture with the party of crime, and informed him of the descent of fifty of the children of light who, at the present moment, formed a colony near Val de Grace, imbued with a really excellent spirit.

“It is simply raining angels in Paris,” he said, laughing.

“Every day some dignitary of the sacred palace falls on one’s head, and soon the Sultan of the Cherubs will have no one to make into Vizirs or guards but the little unbreeched vagabonds of his pigeon coops.”

And when the morrow came he continued his anti-militarist propaganda at Issy-les-Moulineaux.

Like the Titan Prometheus, Istar loved mankind.

Arcade, suffering from all the desires to which the sons of Adam are subjected, found himself lacking in resources to satisfy them. Istar gave him a start in a printing house in the Rue de Vaugirard where he knew the foreman.

But who among us shall boast of his wisdom?

The foresight of man is short, and his prudence is forever being baffled.

The blows of fate are ineluctable; no man shall evade his doom. There is no counsel, no caution that avails against destiny. Hapless as we are, the same blind force which regulates the courses of atom and of star fashions universal order from our vicissitudes.

Louis, six hundred pearls of Marie Antoinette’s broken necklace, the imperial mantle of Charles V, the tiara wrought by Ghiberti for Pope Martin V, the Colonna, Bonaparte’s sword—and I know not what besides.”

“Mere trifles,” said Max Everdingen.

“My dear Baron,” said Prince Istar, “you even possess the ring which Charlemagne placed on a fairy’s finger and which was thought to be lost. But let us discuss the business on which we have come.

and the astute Iahveh gave out that he had sent his own son to earth to redeem with his blood the debt of mankind.

It is not credible that a penalty should redress a fault, and it is still less credible that the innocent should pay for the guilty.

The sufferings of the innocent atone for nothing, and do but add one evil to another. Nevertheless, unhappy creatures were found to adore Iahveh and his son, the expiator, and to announce their mysteries as good tidings. We should not be surprised at this folly.

It is not credible that a penalty should redress a fault, and it is still less credible that the innocent should pay for the guilty.

The sufferings of the innocent atone for nothing, and do but add one evil to another.

Nevertheless, unhappy creatures were found to adore Iahveh and his son, the expiator, and to announce their mysteries as good tidings. We should not be surprised at this folly.

Now men of sensibility are irritable and subject to fits of fury. They were virtuous; they had moral laws, that is to say they conceived certain narrowly defined moral obligations, and judged human actions not by their natural consequences but by abstract principles.

Of all the vices which contribute to the undoing of a statesman, virtue is the most fatal; it leads to murder.

To work effectively for the happiness of mankind, a man must be superior to all morals, like the divine Julius. God, so ill-used for some time past, did not, on the whole, suffer excessively harsh treatment from these new men.

Condorcet, our great man, was an outlaw. I myself was regarded as suspect by the friends of the people, who, in spite of my rustic appearance and my frieze coat, believed me to be an aristocrat, and

I confess that independence of thought is the proudest of all aristocracies.

“One evening while I was stealthily watching the dryads of Boulogne, who gleamed amid the leaves like the moon rising above the horizon, I was arrested as a suspect, and put in prison. It was a pure misunderstanding;

His genius was far-reaching and agile; his intelligence, vast in extent but common and vulgar in character, embraced humanity, but did not rise above it.

He thought what every grenadier in the army thought; but he thought it with unprecedented force.

He loved the game of chance, and it pleased him to tempt fortune by urging pygmies in their hundreds and thousands against each other. It was the game of a child as big as the world.

He thought what every grenadier in the army thought; but he thought it with unprecedented force. He loved the game of chance, and it pleased him to tempt fortune by urging pygmies in their hundreds and thousands against each other.

It was the game of a child as big as the world.

He was too wily not to introduce old Iahveh into the game—Iahveh, who was still powerful on earth, and who resembled him in his spirit of violence and domination. He threatened him, flattered him, caressed him, and intimidated him.

It is of course true that ten angels in revolt are worth more than ten angels of Ialdabaoth; it is not at all certain that a million rebellious angels are worth more than a million of Ialdabaoth’s angels.

Great numbers, in war as elsewhere, annihilate intelligence and individual superiority in favour of a sort of exceedingly rudimentary collective soul.

”

“Pooh!” said the beautiful archangel.

“War is a business. It has always been a business.”

Then they discussed at length the means of executing their immense enterprise. Rejecting disdainfully the anarchistic proceedings of Prince Istar, they conceived a formidable and sudden invasion of the kingdom of Heaven by their enthusiastic and well-drilled troops.

… of some coming glove-fight, and afterwards exert himself to demonstrate to Arcade the existence of God, the necessity for religion, and the beauties of Christianity, and adjure him to renounce his impious and criminal undertakings wherefrom, he said, he would reap but bitterness and disappointment.

“For really,” said the young apologist, “if Christianity were false it would be known.”

The ladies approved of Maurice’s religious sentiments, and when the handsome Arcade uttered some blasphemy in language they could understand, they put their hands to their ears and bade him be silent, for fear of being struck down with him.

Maurice, who loved Madame des Aubels a great deal, also loved Bouchotte a little, and was rather jealous of Arcade.

Now jealousy is a feeling natural to man and beast, and causes them, however slight the attack, keen unhappiness.

Therefore, suspecting the truth, which Bouchotte’s temperament and the angel’s character made sufficiently obvious, he overwhelmed Arcade with sarcasm and abuse, reproaching him with the immorality of his ways.

“Moral law,” replied the angel, “which is supposed to be revealed to us, is drawn in reality from the grossest empiricism. Custom alone regulates morals. What Heaven prescribes is merely the consecration of ancient customs.

The divine law, promulgated amid fireworks on some Mount Sinai, is never anything but the codification of human prejudice.

And from this fact—namely, that morals change—religions which endure for a long time, such as Judaeo-Christianity, vary their moral law.”

“Except when it promotes crime—as, for instance, the murder of Iphigenia.”

“Arcade,” exclaimed Maurice, “when I hear you argue, I rejoice that I am not an intellectual.”

Meanwhile Théophile, with his head bent over the piano, his face hidden by the long fair veil of his hair, bringing down from on high his inspired hands on to the keys, was playing and singing the full score of Aline, Queen of Golconda.

Maurice made her sit down on the bed, and begged Arcade to be seated in the armchair.

“My friend,” said Arcade, “I was innocent. I became man. Straightway I did evil. Then I became better.”

“Do not let us exaggerate things,” said Maurice. “Let’s have a game of bridge.”

Zita expressed her satisfaction at seeing him in this resolute mood. She urged him to pursue the accomplishment of this vast undertaking with undiminished ardour. Nothing must be hurried or deferred.

“A great action, Arcade, is made up of a multitude of small ones; the most majestic whole is composed of a thousand minute details. Let us neglect nothing.”

She had come to take him to a meeting where his presence was required. They were to take a census of the revolutionaries.

And at that moment the old gardener noiselessly appeared. He took his seat, and his dog lay down at his feet.

French cooking is the best in the world. It is a glory that will transcend all others when humanity has grown wise enough to put the spit above the sword.

Clodomir served the angels, and the mortal who was with them, with a soup made of cabbages and bacon, a loin of pork and kidneys cooked in wine, thereby proving himself a real Montmartre cook, and showing that he had not been spoilt by the …

“

That flame was a whole universe which fulfilled its destiny in less than a minute.

Suns and planets were formed therein. Venus Urania apportioned the orbits of the wandering spheres in those infinite spaces. Beneath the breath of Eros—the first of the gods—plants, animals, and thoughts sprang into being.

They fell asleep towards dawn, and they had not yet awoke at ten o’clock in the morning when the concierge brought their tea. While eating his toast and butter and slice of ham, young d’Esparvieu remarked to the angel:

“I used to think that a murder was something very extraordinary. Well, I was mistaken. It is the simplest, the most natural action in the world.”

“And of most ancient tradition,” replied the angel. “For long centuries it was both usual and necessary for man to kill and despoil his fellows. It is still recommended in warfare.