However, if, instead of those two simple lenses, I were to use my more scientifically advanced telescope, I could see beyond all that to Mars, with its seas and snows and canals, could see the outline of its gulfs, the whole geography of a planet that exists thousands of leagues from the Champs-Elysées. And what about another still more brilliant idea! Here you have the primitive eye, the eye of Nature, raised by Civilisation to its maximum power of vision. As regards eyes, clearly I, the civilised man, am happier than the uncivilised man because I can discover the realities of the Universe about which he knows nothing and of which he is, therefore, deprived. If you apply that proof to all the organs, you will understand my principle. As for intelligence and the happiness one gains from it through the endless accumulation of ideas, I ask only that you compare Renan and Cricket, my manservant. It becomes clear then that we must surround ourselves with the maximum possible amount of Civilisation in order to enjoy to the maximum the joy of being alive, don’t you agree, Zé Fernandes?’

It did not seem to me irrefutably true that Renan was necessarily happier than Cricket, nor could I see what spiritual or temporal advantage was to be gained from being able to peer through space at the smudgy spots on a planet – or across the Avenue des Champs-Elysées at the hams hanging in a grocer’s shop window. Nevertheless, I assured him that, of course, I agreed with him, because I’m a good fellow and would never try to dislodge from another man’s mind any idea in which he finds security, discipline and a source of energy. I unbuttoned my waistcoat and, indicating the café and its lights down below, declared:

‘Let’s go downstairs and drink the maximum possible amount of brandy and soda – with ice!’

Naturally enough, Jacinto’s idea of Civilisation was inseparable from the image of the City, an enormous City with all its vast organs in powerful working order. My super-civilised friend could not even comprehend how nineteenth-century man could possibly savour the delight of living far from the stores employing three thousand cashiers, the markets receiving the produce from the gardens and fields of thirty provinces, the banks clinking with universal gold, the factories frantically spewing out smoke and smart new inventions, the libraries bursting with the paperwork of the centuries, the long miles of streets crisscrossed in all directions by telegraph wires and telephone wires, by gas pipes and sewage pipes, the thunderous lines of buses, trams, carriages, velocipedes, rattletraps and de luxe coach-and-pairs, and the two million members of its seething wave of humanity, panting as they scrabble to earn their daily bread or under the vain illusion of pleasure.

When, in his bedroom in No. 202 – its balconies open to the lilac trees in the garden – Jacinto unfurled these images to me, he grew larger and positively glowed. What an august creation the City was! ‘Only in the City, Zé Fernandes, can Man proudly affirm that he has a soul!’

‘But what about religion, Jacinto? Doesn’t religion prove the existence of the soul?’

He shrugged. Religion! Religion was merely the over-development of a rudimentary instinct common to all creatures, namely, terror. A dog licking its owner’s hand, from which he might receive either a bone or a beating, is basically a devotee in primitive form, prostrated in prayer before the one God who offers him Heaven or Hell! But the telephone! The phonograph!

‘Yes, take the phonograph! Even the phonograph, Zé Fernandes, gives me a real sense of my superiority as a thinking being and distinguishes me from the beasts. Believe me, Zé Fernandes, there is only the City and nothing but the City!’

Besides (he added), only the City gave him a sense of human solidarity, as necessary to life as warmth. When, at No. 202, he thought of the huddled masses living in the houses of Paris, two million people sweating and labouring in order to create Civilisation (and to maintain the natural dominion of the Jacintos of this world!), he felt a sense of relief and reassurance comparable only to that of the pilgrim who, as he crosses the desert, sits up on his dromedary and sees, ahead of him, the long line of the caravan, bristling with lights and weapons.

Impressed, I murmured:

‘Gosh!’

It was so very different in the countryside where the indifference and impassivity of Nature made him tremble for his fragile, solitary state. It was as if he were lost in a world with which he had no fraternal bonds; no bramble bush would draw in its thorns to let him pass; if he were groaning with hunger, no tree, however heavy-laden, would hold out a compassionate branch to offer him its fruit. Besides, surrounded by Nature, he became suddenly and humiliatingly aware of the uselessness of all his superior faculties. In the company of plants and animals, what was the point of being a genius or a saint? The wheatfields do not understand The Georgics; and it took God’s eager intervention, the overturning of all natural laws and an outright miracle for the wolf of Gubbio not to devour St Francis of Assisi, who smiled at the creature and held out his arms and addressed it as ‘Brother Wolf’. In the country, all intellect grows sterile, and there’s nothing left but bestiality. In the crass kingdoms of Vegetable and Animal only two functions remain – feeding and breeding. Alone and with nothing to do, surrounded by snouts and roots that never cease to graze and suck, suffocating in the warm breath of universal fecundation, his poor soul shrivelled up, became a little crumb of a soul, a tiny guttering spiritual spark on a poor scrap of matter; and in that poor scrap of matter only two instincts stirred, urgent and imperious – the instincts of appetite and procreation. After a week in the country, all that would remain of his noble being would be a stomach and, below, a phallus! And what of the soul? It was swamped by the beast! He needed then to run back to the City and plunge into the purifying waves of Civilisation, to wash himself clean of that vegetable crust and emerge rehumanised, respiritualised and fully Jacintic!

My friend’s elegant metaphors expressed genuine feelings to which I myself was witness and which tickled me immensely on the one trip we made into the countryside together, to the pleasant and friendly forest of Montmorency. Jacinto’s encounter with the Natural World had all the makings of a farce! As soon as he left wooden floors and macadamized roads, any surface that his feet touched filled him with distrust and terror. Any stretch of grass, however parched, seemed to him to ooze some mortal dampness. In each lump of earth, in the shadow cast by each stone, he feared attack by scorpions, snakes, and other creeping, viscous things. In the silence of the woods he heard only the gloomy depopulation of the universe. He could not bear the over-familiarity of the branches that brushed his sleeve or cheek.