as nothing compared to the truth. You will come to know all these delightful things. I bequeath them to you. Meanwhile, I am going to live in the countryside with my wife. Paris disgusts me.”’
Díaz-Varela closed the slender volume and kept the brief silence appropriate to any ending. He didn’t look at me, but remained with his eyes fixed on the cover, as if unable to decide whether to reopen the book and resume his reading. I couldn’t resist asking about the Colonel again.
‘And what happened to Chabert? Nothing good, I imagine, given such a pessimistic conclusion. But it offers a very partial view of things, as the character himself admits: the view of one of the three kinds of men who cannot think well of the world; the view, according to him, of the unhappiest of the three. Fortunately, there are plenty of other viewpoints, most of which are quite different from that of priests, doctors and lawyers.’
But he didn’t respond. In fact, my initial impression was that he hadn’t even heard me.
‘And that’s how the story ends,’ he said. ‘Well, almost. Balzac has Godeschal give an entirely irrelevant response, which very nearly cancels out the force of that vision; but it’s a minor defect. The novel was written in 1832, one hundred and eighty years ago, although, strangely enough, Balzac places the conversation between the veteran and the novice lawyer in 1840, that is, at a point in the future, a date when he couldn’t even be sure he would still be alive, as if he knew, absolutely, that nothing would change, not just in the next eight years, but ever. If that was his intention, then he was quite right. It’s not just that things are exactly the same now as they were when he was describing them – well, the same, if not worse, ask any lawyer. It’s always been like that. Far more crimes go unpunished than punished, not to speak of those we know nothing about or that remain hidden, for there must inevitably be more hidden crimes than crimes that are known about and recorded. It’s only natural really that Balzac should leave it to Derville rather than to Chabert to speak of the horrors of the world. After all, a soldier tends to play relatively fair, it’s clear what he’s there to do, he doesn’t betray or deceive and he acts not just in obedience to orders, but out of necessity: it’s either his life or that of the enemy who is equally intent on taking his or, rather, who finds himself in exactly the same dilemma. The soldier doesn’t usually act on his own initiative, he doesn’t harbour feelings of hatred or resentment or jealousy, he isn’t motivated by long-held desires or personal ambition; the only motivating force is a vague, rhetorical, empty patriotism, for those soldiers, that is, who are moved by such feelings or allow themselves to be convinced: that happened in Napoleon’s day, but not so much now, because that kind of man no longer exists, at least not in countries like ours with our armies of mercenaries. The carnage of wars is horrific, of course, but those who take part in them are only following orders, they don’t plan the wars, the wars aren’t even entirely planned by the generals or the politicians, who have an increasingly abstract and unreal vision of those bloodbaths and, needless to say, are never present, now less than ever; it’s as if they were dispatching toy soldiers to the front or on a bombing mission, toys whose faces they never see, as though they were simply immersed in some video game. Crimes committed in ordinary life, however, send shudders down the spine, fill you with fear, not so much the crimes in themselves, which are less striking and more scattered, more spaced out, one here, another there; and because they only trickle into our consciousness, they cause less outrage and tend not to provoke waves of protest however incessantly they occur. No, it’s what the crimes themselves mean that’s frightening. They always involve an individual will and a personal motive, each crime is conceived and planned by a single mind, or a few minds if it’s some kind of conspiracy; and given all the crimes that have been and still are being committed, those many different crimes, separated from each other by kilometres or years or centuries, could not, therefore, have been the product of mutual contagion; and that, in a