Honesty

§383 "Mystery, as that of educated society, withdraws, it is true, from the antithesis into the inner sphere. Nevertheless, high society once again has exclusively its own circles in which it preserves the holy. It is, as it were, the chapel for this holy of holies. But for people in the forecourt, the chapel itself is the mystery. Education, therefore, in its exclusive position is the same thing for the people ... as vulgarity is for the educated."

§384 It is true, nevertheless, once again, as it arere, but, therefore - those are the magic hooks which hold together the links of the chain of speculative reasoning. Herr Szeliga has made Mystery withdraw from the world of criminals into high society. Now he has to construct the mystery that high society has its exclusive circles and that the mysteries of those circles are mysteries for the people. Besides the magic hooks already mentioned, this construction requires the transformation of a circle into a chapel and the transformation of non-aristocratic society into a forecourt of that chapel. Again it is a mystery for Paris that all the spheres of bourgeois society are only a forecourt of the chapel of high society.

§385 Herr Szeliga pursues two aims. Firstly, Mystery which has become incarnate in the exclusive circle of high society must be declared "common property of the world”. Secondly, the notary Jacques Ferrand must be construed as a link in the life of Mystery. Here is the way Herr Szeliga reasons:

§386 "Education as yet is unable and unwilling to bring all estates and distinctions into its circle. Only Christianity and morality are able to found universal kingdoms on earth."

§387 Herr Szeliga identifies education, civilisation, with aristocratic education. That is why he cannot see that industry and trade found universal kingdoms quite different from Christianity and morality, domestic happiness and civic welfare. But how do we come to the notary Jacques Ferrand? Quite simply!

§388 Herr Szeliga transforms Christianity into an individual quality, "piety”, and morality into another individual quality, "probity". He combines these two qualities in one individual whom he christens Jacques Ferrand, because Jacques Ferrand does not possess these two qualities but only pretends to. Thus Jacques Ferrand becomes the "mystery of probity and piety". His "testament", on the other hand, is "the mystery of seeming piety and probity", and therefore no longer of piety and probity themselves. If Critical Criticism had wanted speculatively to construe this testament as a mystery, it should have declared the seeming probity and piety to be the mystery of this testament, and not the other way round, this testament as the mystery of the seeming probity.

§389 Whereas the Paris college of notaries considered Jacques Ferrand as a malicious libel against itself and through the theatrical censorship had this character removed from the stage performance of the Mysteres de Paris, Critical Criticism, at the very time when it "polemises against the airy kingdom of conceptions”, sees in a Paris notary not a Paris notary but religion and morality, probity and piety. The trial of the notary Lehon ought to have taught it better. The position held by the notary in Eugene Sue's novel is closely connected with his official position.

§390 "Les notaires sont au temporel ce qu'au spirituel sont les curés; ils sont les dépositaires de nos secrets" (Monteil, Hist[oire] des frangais des div[ers] états," etc. t. ix, p. 37).

§391 The notary is the secular confessor. He is a puritan by profession, and "honesty", Shakespeare says, is "no Puritan".' He is at the same time the go-between for all possible purposes, the manager of all civil intrigues and plots.

§392 With the notary Ferrand, whose whole mystery consists in his hypocrisy and his profession, we do not seem to have made a single step forward yet. But listen:

§393 "If for the notary hypocrisy is a matter of the most complete consciousness, and for Madame Roland it is, as it were, instinct, then between them there is the great mass of those who cannot get to the bottom of the mystery and yet involuntarily feel a desire to do so. It is therefore not superstition that leads the high and the low to the sombre dwelling of the charlatan Bradamanti (Abbe Polidori); no, it is the search for Mystery, to justify themselves to the world."

§394 "The high and the low" flock to Polidori not to find out a definite mystery which is justified to the whole world, but to look for Mystery in general, Mystery as the Absolute Subject, in order to justify themselves to the world; as if to chop wood one looked, not for an axe, but for the Instrument in abstracto.

§395 All the mysteries that Polidori possesses are limited to a means for abortion and a poison for murder.- In a speculative frenzy Herr Szeliga makes the "murderer" resort to Polidori's poison "because he wants to be not a murderer, but respected, loved and honoured". As if in an act of murder it was a question of respect, love or honour and not of one's neck! But the Critical murderer does not bother about his neck, but only about "Mystery".- As not everyone commits murder or becomes pregnant illegitimately, how is Polidori to put everyone in the desired possession of Mystery? Herr Szeliga probably confuses the charlatan Polidori with the scholar Polydore Virgil who lived in the sixteenth century and who, although he did not discover any mysteries, tried to make the history of those who did, the inventors, the "common property of ~he world" (see Polidori Virgilii liber de rerum inventoribus, Lugduni MDCCVI).

§396 Mystery, Absolute Mystery, as it has finally established itself as the "common property of the world", consists therefore in the mystery of abortion and poisoning. Mystery could not make itself "the common property of the world" more skilfully than by turning itself into mysteries which are mysteries to no one.