Télévision au XVIIe siècle : un monde rempli d'horreurs

Vn Professeur en Theologie m'a ecrit que depuis peu un gentilhomme ayant prié un Italien qui est soldat dans la garnison de Sedan de luy faire uoir quelque chose d'extraordinaire, il luy auoit faict uoir dans un miroir une femme qui est a cent lieues dela ecriuant sur sa table, ce qui l'effraya et l'obligea de se retirer. Pour iuger de ceste auanture il faudroit auoir la chose et examiner le lieu ou estoit le miroir, s'il n'y auoit rien derriere. Ie uoudrois encore qu'il y eust plusieurs personnes qui pussent rendre temoignage de ce qu'ils auroyent veu, et il seroit necessaire que ces temoins la ne fussent pas credules ny preoccupez ny timides parce que la peur nous represente les obiects autrement qu'ils ne sont. Ie croy que Dieu ne permet pas que les hommes ayent commerce auec les demons parce que le monde seroit rempli d'horreurs. que ne feroit un Ambitieux et un vindicatif s'ils pouuoient venir a bout de leurs desseins.

 

Henri Justel to G. W. Leibniz, 9 November 1677 

(Allgemeiner und Politischer Briefwechsel 1676-1679, No. 275)

 

A theology professor wrote to me that recently, when a gentleman asked an Italian who is a soldier at the Sedan garrison to show him something out of the ordinary, the Italian caused him to see in a mirror a woman writing at her table a hundred leagues away, which terrified the gentleman, forcing him to leave the room. In order to judge this episode, it would be necessary to have the mirror and to examine where it was, in case there was anything behind it. I would further like to have a number of people able to provide an account of what they saw, and it would be necessary that such witnesses not have been gullible or distracted or fainthearted, since fear represents objects to us differently than they are. I believe that God does not allow mankind to engage in commerce with demons because then the world would be filled with horrors. What would an ambitious and a vindictive man not be capable of if they were able to achieve their designs?

Obscure waters

Still, what if I approach the august sphere

Named now with only one name, disentwine

That under-current soft and argentine

From its fierce mate in the majestic mass

Leavened as the sea whose fire was mixt with glass

In John's transcendent vision,—launch once more

That lustre? Dante, pacer of the shore

Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,

Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume—

Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope

Into a darkness quieted by hope;

Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye

In gracious twilights where his chosen lie,—

I would do this! If I should falter now!

Robert Browning, from Sordello (1840), Book the First 

 

 

Into the hollow halls of the Underworld must every poet venture

Weil vom Wohllaut deiner Lieder 

Selbst das Totenreich erbebte, 

Kam's, daß die Geliebte wieder 

In den lichten Äther schwebte.

 

Hättest du nur nicht so zweifelnd 

Deinen Blick züruckgewendet, 

Wäre ihr ein neues Leben 

Durch des Liedes Kraft gespendet.

 

In der Unterwelt Gehäuse

Muß sich jeder Dichter wagen,

Um wie Orpheus Eurydiken

In das Licht emporzutragen.

 

Meines Weinbergs Hyazinthen,

Welche Muskatduft verhauchen,

Haben ohne Zweifel Wurzeln,

Die bis in den Hades tauchen.

 

Dieser Duft ist wie ein Schlüssel

Zu den allerfernsten Räumen,

Wo die Geister aller Blumen

Ihre Liebesträume träumen.

 

Charons schwarzer Nachen kann nicht

Nach dem andern Ufer finden,

Ohen daß die lichten Horen

Hier ein Rosensträußchen winden.

 

 Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898-1977)

 At the euphony of your songs, the kingdom of the dead itself did tremble. It came about that the beloved did float once more into the bright upper air. / Had you not so doubtingly turned back your gaze, to her would have been granted new life through the power of song. / Into the hollow halls of the Underworld must every poet venture, that like Orpheus he might carry Eurydice up into the light. / There is no doubt that my vineyard hyacinths, which exhale a scent of musk, have roots that plunge into Hades. / This fragrance is like a key to the farthermost spaces, where the spirits of all flowers dream their dreams of love. / Charon's swart boat cannot reach the other shore unless here the bright hours wind a garland of roses.

The horrors of Sleep

Hell? but whence came the descriptions of its Torments? From the imagination? But who having experienced what can be suffered in distempered Sleep, will compare the imaginative unsensational power of the man awake with the imagination that the Soul produces & suffers in Sleep?---One of the most horrible of these states of Morbid Sleep is the Sensation that counterfeits Remorse---& actual Remorse we know, when intense, realizes all the horrors of Sleep & seems indeed the identity or co-inherence of Sleep & Wake, Reality and Imagination.---If then Hell mean, & I know no more rational meaning, the state & natural consequences of a diseased Soul abandoned to itself or additionally tortured by the very organic case which had before sheltered it, and the force of the blows & blunted the point and edge of the daggers---it must contain---& surpass all the description of Hell, that were the portraits of the disturbed imagination---/---To consider the proper consequences an Act or Course of Action is to consider the Act itself, and no way inconsistent with the hatred of Sin for its own sake. 

Entry 4846, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

Mundus mortuorum

When you get to the end of this book [The Third Policeman] you realise that my hero or main character (he's a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he has earned for the killing. Towards the end of the book (before you know he's dead) he manages to get back to his own house where he used to live with another man who helped in the original murder. Although he's been away 3 days, this other fellow is 20 years older and dies of fright when he sees the other lad standing in the door. Then the two of them walk back along the road to the hell place and start going thro' all the same terrible adventures again, the first fellow being surprised and frightened at everything just as he was the first time and as if he'd never been through it before. It is made clear that this sort of thing goes on forever - and there you are. It's supposed to be very funny but I don't know about that either. If it's ever published I'll send you a copy. I envy you the way you write just what you want to and like it when it's finished. I can never seem to get anything just right. Nevertheless, I think the idea of a man being dead all the time is pretty new. When you are writing about the world of the dead - and the damned - where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny cracks. 

 

Flann O'Brien to William Saroyan, 14 February 1940

The dark star

Quare ex particulis hic mundus constat, ac ille


Ex totis, vivis per se, distantibus a se,


Singula nonnulli credunt quoque sidera posse


Dici orbes, terramque appellant sidus opacum,


Cui minimus divum praesit: quia nubibus infra


Imperium teneat, producatque omnia solus,


Corpora, quae aequor habet, tellusque infimus aër:

Umbrarum dominus, simulacraque viva gubernans, 

Cui data sit rerum cura et moderamen earum:

Quae quia non durant, sed tempore corrumpuntur


Exiguo, prope nil possunt, umbraeque vocari.


Hic reor est Pluton, a quo tenebrosa teneri

Regna canunt vates: namque infra nubila nox est,


Supra autem lux clara nitet, splendorque perennis:


Huic igitur, tanquam minimo, Deus ille deorum

Rex genitorque dedit vilissima regna, aliosque


Ut quisque est melior, melioribus addidit astris,


Imperiumque suum natis divisit habendum.

Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus,  Zodiacus vitae (1536), Liber VII

By reason of the fact that this world consists of parts, and that world(*) of wholes, living through themselves, separate from each other, some believe that each star may be said to be a world, and they call the Earth the dark star, over which reigns the least of the gods,(†) for he wields power underneath the clouds, where he alone generates all things, the lord of shadows, governing the living simulacra that are the bodies which exist in sea, on land, and in lower air. To him is given the care and management of these things which, since they do not last, but waste away in a short time, scarcely deserve to be called even shadows. I deem him to be the same Pluto who, so the ancient bards sing, rules the dark kingdom, for underneath the clouds it is night, whereas up above pure light and eternal splendour shine. To him, therefore, as the least of them all, the God of gods, King and Creator, gave the basest realms. The other gods, in order of which was the better, He joined to better stars, dividing the rule of his kingdom among his sons.

* The preceding lines lay out a Platonic hierarchy of Being in descending order, from the higher world of the noumenal to the lower world of the phenomenal, from light to darkness, from indivisible wholes to sundry parts.

† Quoted by Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1.1.2.2): 'The air is not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible devils: this Paracelsus stiffly maintains, and that they have every one their several chaos; others will have infinite worlds, and each world his peculiar spirits, gods, angels, and devils to govern and punish it. Singula nonnulli credunt . . .  Cui minimus divum praesit.'

Toad-imp whispers

26 April 1826. Wednesday Night. This Morning a little before three suffered one of my most grievous and alarming <Scream->Dreams—and on at length struggling myself awake found just such a focus of Ferment just above the Navel as if the Dæmon of Aqua Fortis had just closed in with the Genie Magnesia, or as if a Chocolate Mill were making a Water-spout dance a reel in dizzy-frisk.—It is strongly impressed on my mind, that I shall imitate my dear Father in this as faithfully as Nature imitates or repeats him in me in so many other points—viz. that I shall die in sleep […]
    Since I first read Swedenborg’s De Coelo et de Inferno ex Auditis et Visis, every horrid Dream, that I have, my thoughts involuntarily turn to the passage […] (indeed to the whole Book I am indebted for imagining myself always in Hell, i.e. imagining all the wild Chambers, Ruins, Prisons, Bridewells, to be in Hell)—Sunt Spiritus, qui nondum in conjunctione cum Inferno sunt: illi amant indigesta et maligna, qualia sunt sordescentium Ciborum in Ventriculo*—Swedenborg had often talked with them, and driven them away, & immediately the poor Sleeper’s frightful Dreams were removed, they being the spiritual Linguifacture of these Toad-Imps’ whispers. 

 

Entry 5360, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4: 1819-1826, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, London: Routledge, 2002.

 

* There are spirits that are not yet conjoined with Hell: they love things undigested and malignant such as befouled victuals in the belly.

An epitaph

Son of man, tell me,

Hast thou at any time lain in thick darkness,

Gazing up into a lightless silence,

A dark void vacancy,

Like the woe of the sea

In the unvisited places of the ocean?

And nothing but thine own frail sentience 

To prove thee living?

Lost in this affliction of the spirit,

Did'st thou then call upon God 

Of his infinite mercy to reveal to thee

Proof of his presence -

His presence and love for thee, exquisite creature

    of his creation?

To show thee but some small devisal 

Of his infinite compassion and pity even

    though it were as fleeting

As the light of a falling star in a dewdrop?

Hast thou? O, if thou hast not,

Do it now; do it now; do it now!

Lest that night come which is sans sense,

    thought, tongue, stir, time, being,

And the moment is for ever denied thee,

Since thou art thyself as I am.

 

Walter de la Mare,  ‘Strangers and Pilgrims’ (1936)

Sterility

Les grands désastres ne rendent rien sur le plan littéraire ni religieux. Seuls les demi-malheurs sont féconds, parce qu'ils peuvent être, parce qu'ils sont un point de départ, alors qu'un enfer trop parfait est presque aussi stérile que le paradis.

Cioran, De l'inconvénient d'être né, Éditions Gallimard, 1973

The great disasters yield nothing on the literary or religious level. The semi-adversities alone are fruitful, because they are able to be, because they are a point of departure, whereas too perfect a hell is almost as sterile as heaven.

Neurospasts

(...) But the shows went on.

At length a voice out of the Void explained things. ‘You see,’ it said, ‘that—over there—you were not remarkable for a sense of humour, but you were distinguished by a marked business capacity. And business capacity consists, if you come to think of it, in treating your fellow creatures, not as if they were sentient beings, but as if they were puppets. The result is that the living beings who come here do not care to associate with you. We are trying to find what amusement we can for you. This is really the best we have to offer.’

Here Gribble lost his temper. ‘How long, confound it, am I to go on looking at the infernal things?’ he said, getting purple.

‘You might be more polite. I said we were doing our best.’

‘How long—that’s what I want to know—am I to go on looking at the conf—the toys? It seems an age already since—’

‘It is an age. It’s exactly a hundred years.’

From purple Gribble turned ghastly pale. His teeth chattered. ‘A hun—a hundred years! Good God! . . . And to—how long must I go on still?’

‘Ah! That I can’t say. Possibly for eternity. If so it can’t be helped.’

Charles Francis Keary,  ‘The Puppet Show’, ’Twixt Dog and Wolf (1901)

 

They that are acted onely by an outward Law are but like Neurospasts,* or those little Puppets that skip nimbly up and down, and seem to be full of quick and sprightly motion; whereas they are all the while moved artificially by certain Wires and Strings from without, and not by any Principle of Motion from themselves within; or else like Clocks and Watches, that go pretty regularly for a while, but are moved by Weights and Plummets, or some other artificial Springs, that must be ever now and then wound up, or else they cease. But they that are acted by (...) the Law of the Spirit, they have an inward principle of life in them, that from the Centre of it self puts forth it self freely (...) a kind of Musicall Soul, informing the dead Organ of our Hearts, that makes them of their own accord delight to act harmoniously to the Rule of God's word.

Ralph Cudworth, A Discourse Concerning the True Notion of the Lord’s Supper (1670) 

 

* Greek νευρόσπαστον, a puppet moved by strings; νεῦρον sinew, string + σπᾶν to draw, pull. Cf. Henry More, Psychathanasia, Book 1, Canto 2, Stanza 33: That outward form is but a neurospast; / The soul it is that on her subtile ray, / That she shoots out, the limbs of moving beast / Doth stretch straight forth, so straightly as she may. / Bones joynts, and sinews shap’d of stubborn clay / Cannot so eas’ly lie in one straight line / With her projected might, much lesse obey / Direct retractions of these beames fine: / Of force, so straight retreat they ever must decline. 

 

Dialogues of the dead

Passons outre, je sens desia que ce livre nous eschappe, & me semble que je voy desia un frippon de proposant*, qui s’est joinct avec un aspirant à la prestrise mediante coquedindo†, & ils disent que je suis Nigromanchian‡, que je fais parler des morts.

[Béroalde de Verville], Le Moyen de parvenir. Oevure contenant la raison de tout ce qui a esté, est, & sera. Avec demonstrations certaines & necessaires, selon la rencontre des effets de VERTU. Et adviendra que ceux qui auront nez à porter Lunettes s’en serviront, ainsi qu’il est escrit au dictionnaire à dormir en toutes langues, S. Recensuit Sapiens ab A, ad Z. Imprimé cette année [1616] 

* proposant — theology student preparing to become a Protestant minister or pastor.

† mediante coquedindo — by the intercession of a coq d’Inde (turkey cock), i.e., Jesuit. The dinde (Meleagris) was imported to France by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century.

‡ Nigromanchian — ‘nécromancien’, hapax legomenon; ‘negromancer’ (= ‘necromancer’), but with puns on ‘chien’, where ‘chiens’ satirically refers to the theologians engaged in a dialogue of the dead throughout the book, and possibly on ‘manche’.

Come away, I now perceive that this book is slipping out of our hands; I see a rascally Protestant with one that hopes to be a priest, mediante coquedindo; look, they put their heads together and declare that I am guilty of necromancy because I make the dead to speak. 

Fantastic Tales or the Way to Attain--A Book Full of Pantagruelism Now for the First Time Done into English, trans. Arthur Machen. Privately Printed, Carbonnek, 1923

The void

 

(...) That shade. Once lying. Now standing. That a body? Yes. Say that a body. Somehow standing. In the dim void. 

A place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now. Know only no out of. No knowing how know only no out of. Into only. Hence another. Another place where none. Whither once whence no return. No. No place but the one. None but the one where none. Whence never once in. Somehow in. Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there. (...)

 

Samuel Beckett, "Worstward Ho" (1981-82). Poems. Short Fiction. Criticism. The Grove Centenary Edition, Volume IV. Ed. Paul Auster. Grove Press, New York, 2006. Pp. 472-3.

The music of hell (2)

 No people sing with such pure voices as those who live in deepest Hell; what we take for the song of angels is their song.

Franz Kafka, unpublished letter, quoted in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind. Essays in modern German literature and thought (1952), Penguin Books, 1961, p. 202

The music of hell

 The whole work [Adrian Leverkühn's Apocalypsis cum Figuris] is dominated by the paradox (if it is a paradox) that in it dissonance stands for the expression of everything lofty, solemn, pious, everything of the spirit; while consonance and firm tonality are reserved for the world of hell, in this context a world of banality and commonplace. [...] Adrian's capacity for mocking imitation, which was rooted deep in the melancholy of his being, became creative here in the parody of the different musical styles in which the insipid wantonness of hell indulges: French impressionism is burlesqued, along with bourgeois drawing-room music, Tchaikovsky, music-hall, the syncopations and rhythmic somersaults of jazz - like a tilting-ring it goes round and round, gaily glittering, above the fundamental utterance of the main orchestra, which, grave, sombre, and complex, asserts with radical severity the intellectual level of the work as a whole.

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, Chapter XXXIV, 

translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter

The figure of hell

 

Hic Noe et filii ejus corpus Christi cum apostolis habens.

Hic aves typum significant martyrum.

Hic oves typum continent virginitate.

Hic animalia quae carnem non comedunt typum coniugii.

Hic animalia quae carnem comedunt, typum ferocium peccatorum.

Hic ubi stercus mittebatur, typus inferni.

The Venerable Bede, Similitudo Arcae Noe

 

Here Noah and his sons embody Christ and the Apostles.

Here the birds signify the figure of the martyrs. 

Here the sheep embody chastity.

Here the non-flesh-eating animals are the figure of wedlock.

Here the flesh-eating animals are the figure of cruel sinners.

Here, where the dung is cast, is the figure of hell.

See also the Buddhist sub-hell Nyôfunjo (Dung Pit) or  shifunsho (place of excrement).

La pourtraiture de la dicte cisterne tant doloureuse

Si prist l'ame a regarder entour d'elle s'en aucune maniere elle pourroit veoir comment elle estoit la venue et en regardant ça et la, elle percheu une grant fosse toute quarree, tout ainsi come une cisterne. De celle fosse sailloit ung tourbillon de flambe grant, artant et puant a merveilles, et luy sembloit bonnement que la fumiere contremontoit jusques au chiel. En celle vapeur et tourbillon avoit si tres grant nombre de dyables et ainsi de ames ensemble quy aloient avec l'ayr tout en le flambe et en la fumiere, que c'estoit une tres horrible chose a regarder. Et quant icelles ames estoient montees en l'ayr moult hault, si recheoient tout a coup ou partont de la fournaise. Et quant 'ame du chevallier ot veu ce  tant douloureux tourment, elle s'en vouloit traire arriere, mais elle ne pouoit lever ses piés de la terre pour le grant paour qu'ell avoit. Et quant elle vey que sa voulenté ne pouoit accomplir, si se courrouça moult forment et dist: «Hellas! chaitisve, pourquoy ne vouloies tu croire les Escriptures?»

Les Visions du Chevalier Tondal de David Aubert 

(Los Angeles, Getty Museum, ms. 30, fo. 29ra)

Then his soul began to look around in an attempt to understand how it had come there and in so doing it saw a great pit, all square, just like a cistern. From this pit gushed an eddy of huge flame, blazing and stinking, and it was as if the smoke rose to the very sky. In that steam and eddy there was a very great number of devils and souls together that were lifted into the air within the flame and smoke, this being a most horrific thing to behold. And when these souls had been lifted very high in the air, they would all of a sudden tumble back down into the furnace. When the knight's soul saw this so pitiful torment, it would have turned away, but it could not raise its feet from the ground so great was the fear it felt. And seeing that it could not achieve its will, it was greatly angered and said, "Alas! wretched soul, wherefore wilt thou not believe in the Scriptures?"

...ku glas amar...

Fresco, 1722, porch of the Kretzulescu Church, Calea Victoriei, Bucharest

toothache

"Where the hell am I?"

A single point of rock, peak of a mountain range, one tooth set in the ancient jaw of a sunken world, projecting through the inconceivable vastness of the whole ocean--and how many miles from dry land? An evil pervasion, not the convulsive panic of his first struggles in the water, but a deep and generalized terror set him clawing at the rock with his blunt fingers.

William Golding, Pincher Martin, Faber and Faber, 1956; 1962, p. 30. 

Christopher Hadley Martin had no belief in anything but the importance of his own life, no God. Because he was created in the image of God he had a freedom of choice which he used to centre the word on himself. He did not believe in purgatory and therefore when he died it was not presented to him in overtly theological terms. The greed for life which was the mainspring of his nature forced him to refuse the selfless act of dying. He continued to exist separately in a world composed of his own murderous nature. His drowned body lies rolling in the Atlantic but the ravenous ego invents a rock for him to endure on. It is the memory of an aching tooth. Ostensibly and rationally he is a survivor from a torpedoed destroyer: but deep down he knows the truth. He is not fighting for bodily survival but for his continuing identity in face of what will smash it and sweep it away--the black lightning, the compassion of God. For Christopher, the Christ-bearer, has become Pincher Martin who is little but greed. Just to be Pincher is purgatory; to be Pincher for eternity is hell.

William Golding, 

quoted in Bernard S. Oldsey and Stanley Weintraub,  The Art of William Golding,

 Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1965, p. 94.

The odours in hell

καὶ καλῶς Ἡράκλειτος εἶπεν ὅτι αἱ ψυχαὶ ὀσμῶνται καθ᾽ ῞Αιδην.

and Heraclitus was right in saying that souls employ smell in Hades.

Plutarch, De Facie in Orbe Lunae 943e

[The odours in hell] are like those of the various wild beasts, of mice, cats, dogs, foxes, wolves, panthers, bears, tigers, or swine. Further, like the stench of the excrements of these beasts, and also of man; like the bad odour of stagnant waters, and marshes; like that of various dead bodies; like that of various putrid substances; like that of privies, urinals, and snakes; like the bad smell of dregs, and of vomit; like the smell of various he-goats. These they sniff in with their noses and by their eyes are led to the places whence they emanate. […] The infernals shun heavenly perfumes, and the inhabitants of heaven the stenches of hell. On this account all domiciles in hell are closed. For this reason the children of Israel were commanded to carry their excrements outside of their camp, and to bury them there. When the dwellings in hell are opened they excite nausea and a desire to vomit; which has been several times experienced by myself. […] All those who are in hell turn their backs towards heaven and cannot endure the least odour thence.

Documents concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg, 

ed. trans. R. L. Tafel, Vol. 2, Part 2, London, 1877, pp. 768-9

See also Shifunsho (place of excrement) or Nyôfunjo (Dung Pit)

de statu post mortem

'Hell?' breathed Miss Lacey.

'"The state after death",' called Mr Sully, still peering into the gloom--and stepped back rather hurriedly in the intense pale lilac illumination of a sudden flickering blaze of lightning.

Thunder now clanged directly overhead, and still Mr Eaves gazed softly yet earnestly into nothingness, as if in deep thought.

'Whatever you like to call it,' he began again steadily pushing his way, 'that's how I take it. I sit with my wife, all just the same; cap and "front" and all, just the same; gas burning, decanter on the table, books in the case, marble clock on the mantelpiece, just the same. Or perhaps I'm walking in the street, just the same; carts and shops and dogs, all just the same. Or perhaps I'm here, same as I might be now; with Sully there, and you there, and him there,' he nodded towards the commissionaire. 'All just the same. For ever, and ever, and ever.' He raised his empty glass to his lips, and glanced almost apologetically towards his old friend. 'For ever, and ever,' he repeated, and put it down again.

'He simply means,' said Mr Sully, 'no change. Like one of those blessed things on the movies; over and over again, click, click, click, click, click; you know. I tell him it's his sentence, my dear.'

'But if it's the same,' Miss Lacey interposed, with a little docile frown of confusion, 'then what's different?' (...)

'Why,' said Mr Eaves, 'it seems as if there I can't change either; can't. If you were to ask me how I know--why, I couldn't say. It's a dream. But that's what's the difference. There's nothing to come. Now: why! I might change in a score of ways; just take them as they come. I might fall ill; or Mrs Eaves might. I might come into some money; marry again. God bless me, I might die! But there, that's all over; endless; no escape; nothing. I can't even die. I'm just meself, Miss Lacey; Sully, old friend. Just meself, for ever, and ever. Nothing but me looking on at it all, if you take me--just what I've made of it. It's my'--his large pale eyes roved aimlessly--'it's just what Mr Sully says, I suppose; it's my sentence. Eh, Sully? wasn't that it? My sentence?' He smiled courageously.

'Sentence, oh no! Sentence? You!' cried Miss Lacey incredulously. 'How could you, Mr Sully? Sentence! Whatever for, sir?'

Mr Eaves again glanced vaguely at the sleeper, and then at his friend's round substantial shoulders, rigidly turned on him. He fixed his eyes on the clock.

'You've never done no harm, Mr Eaves!' cried Miss Lacey, almost as if in entreaty.

'You see,' said the old gentleman, glancing over his shoulder, 'it isn't what you do: so I seem to take it.' Mr Sully half turned from the door, as if to listen. 'It's what you are,' said Mr Eaves, as if to himself.

'Why, according to that,' said Miss Lacey, in generous indignation, 'who's safe?'

Walter de la Mare, "The Three Friends"

First published in Saturday Westminster Gazette, 19 April 1913;
The Picnic and Other Stories, 1941;

Short Stories 1895-1926, ed. Giles de la Mare, London, 1996, p. 97-98