Refutation Lydie Salvayre (bio) Translated by Roxanne Lapidus Since we have in common, Monsieur, the fact of having been persecuted—you by the great Louis, the false scientists and the Jesuits, me by my wife, who never found satisfaction except in scolding me; since the evil-doers and fanatics went so far as to exile us—you to Egmond, me to Chatenay Malabris—you confined in an oven, me in my little room; since we both share the same abhorrence for worldly masquerades and the same tranquil taste for deserts—social deserts, I mean; since neither of us can stand to have anyone barge in on our retreats and come tramping around our inhuman solitudes; since both of us frequented someone whose first name was Christine—yours beautiful and of royal blood, mine red-faced and domestic; since it is no exaggeration to say that both of them desired our death and in a certain sense obtained it; since we both consider that the air of Paris is noxious to us because of the innumerable amusements there and because of the majority of people there who make a point of lying; since you affirmed that reason was equal in all men, from which I infer that my own naturally equals yours in expanse and penetration; since you finally (quite imprudently) exhorted men to throw off the yoke of all authority and only recognize that of reason, I authorize myself here to throw off yours, and for all these reasons cited here that make us brothers, I declare to you fraternally the following, which no one heretofore has risked saying to you: your fault is enormous, Monsieur, enormous in relation to me, enormous in relation to the world. I am going to demonstrate this to you and definitively confound you. I live alone with my cat, Basile. In the desert. In what you call, and what I, after you, call the desert. In Chatenay Malabris, a village in l'Oise that doesn't even have a cafe. And where night and day I feed upon the bread of my tears. Why? Because, Monsieur, for a long time I believed in what you said, and for a long time followed the impossible route that you pointed out. You said, Monsieur, that there was nothing that was more in our power than our thoughts. But, after thirty years of renewed efforts, I am forced to conclude that there is nothing that I master less than my thoughts. For my thoughts, Monsieur, assail me whenever they wish. They lead me astray or bog me down. They suddenly disperse. They dawdle. They spin. They wander. They dive anywhere, but most often toward the abyss. They are stubborn when I [End Page 10] want to push them away, and escape when I want to keep them. They come helter-skelter when I wish they were in perfect order. They fight among themselves in the most vulgar fashion. In a word, they drive me much more than I drive them; they govern me much more than I govern them. And to claim the opposite, as you have done, Monsieur, to claim that reason can be compared to a kind of disciplined army, when for all men it is nothing but something disorderly, in motion, unpredictable and whose exercise exhausts one—to claim that, is, pardon me, to lie. Enormous is your wrong in the propagation of this lie. For this lie, through your efforts, has been propagated throughout the world, making the French (which includes myself, unfortunately)—making the French, as I was saying, the self-proclaimed champions of common sense, of argumentative rigor, and of the perfection of taste. When one realizes what were the results of this! When one realizes what are the results of this! Enormous is your wrong in having affirmed, peremptorily, that animals were nothing but mechanisms, with no soul. Now, I myself can assure you that my cat Basile cannot be regulated at the whim of an alarm clock, that he is of an irreproachable elegance in all things, and never submits the love that he avows for me to the systematic doubt that is usual among the vulgar and the...