The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas Read Online Free PDF

the Borgias, if a poet painted you as the Catholic Messalina, along came an incredulous Gregorovius who did a great deal to quench that quality and even if you didn’t come out a lily, you weren’t a smelly fen either. I’ll take my position between the poet and the savant.
    So, long live history, voluble history, which is good at anything, and, getting back to the
idée fixe
, let me say that it’s what produces strong men and madmen. A mobile idea, vague or changeable, is what produces a Claudius—according to the formula of Suetonius.
    My idea was fixed, fixed like … I can’t think of anything fixed enough in this world: maybe the moon, maybe the pyramids of Egypt, maybe the dead German Diet. Let the reader find the comparison that fits best, let him find it and not stand there with his nose out of joint just because we haven’t got to the narrative part of these memoirs. We’ll get there. I think he prefers anecdotes to reflections, like other readers, his confreres, and I think he’s right. So let’s get on with it. It must be said, however, that this book is written with apathy, with the apathy of a man now freed of the brevity of the century, a supinely philosophical work, of an unequal philosophy, now austere, now playful, something that neither builds nor destroys, neither inflames nor cools, and, yet, it is more than a pastime and less than an apostolate.
    Let’s go. Straighten out your nose and let’s get back to the poultice. Let’s leave history with its whims of an elegant lady. Neither of us fought the battle of Salamina or wrote the Augsburg Confession. Formy part, if I can ever remember Cromwell it’s only because of the idea that His Highness, with the same hand that locked up Parliament might have imposed the Brás Cubas poultice on the English. Don’t laugh at that joint victory of pharmaceutics and puritanism. Who isn’t aware that beneath every great, public, showy flag quite often there are several other modestly private banners that are unfurled and waving in the shadow of the first, and ever so many times outlive it? To make a poor comparison, it’s like the rabble huddled in the shadow of a feudal castle, and when the latter fell, the riffraff remained. The fact is they became big shots and castellans… No, that’s not a good comparison.

V
In Which a Lady’s Ear Appears
     
    When I was busy preparing and refining my invention, however, I was caught in a strong draft. I fell ill right after and I didn’t take care of myself. I had the poultice on my brain. I was carrying with me the
idée fixe
of the mad and the strong. I could see myself from a distance rising up from the mob-ridden earth and ascending to heaven like an immortal eagle, and before such a grand spectacle no man can feel the pain that’s jabbing at him. The next day I was worse. I finally did something about it, but in an incomplete way, with no method or attention or follow-through. Such was the origin of the illness that brought me to eternity. You already know that I died on a Friday, an unlucky day, and I think I’ve shown that it was my invention that killed me. There are less lucid and no less winning demonstrations.
    It might not have been impossible, however, for me to have climbed to the heights of a century and figure in the pages of newspapers among the great. I was healthy and robust. Let it be imagined that, instead of laying down the bases for a pharmaceutical invention, I was trying to bring together the elements of a political institution or a religious reformation.The current of air came and efficiently conquered human calculations and there went everything. That’s the way man’s fate goes.
    With that reflection I took leave of the woman, I won’t say the most discreet, but certainly the most beautiful among her contemporaries, the one whose imagination, like the storks on the Ilissus … She was fifty-four then, she was a ruin, a splendid ruin. Let the reader imagine that we had been in