All this terrifies the good Arab, his wife, his sister, all his little
family into a state of panic. They have good sense about everything
else, but on this article their imagination is wounded, as was the
imagination of Pascal, who continually saw a precipice beside his
armchair. But does our Arab believe in fact in Mohammed's sleeve? No. He
makes efforts to believe; he says it is impossible, but that it is true;
he believes what he does not believe. On the subject of this sleeve he
forms in his head a chaos of ideas which he is afraid to disentangle;
and this veritably is not to have common sense.
_CONCATENATION OF EVENTS_
The present is delivered, it is said, of the future. Events are linked
to each other by an invincible fatality: it is Destiny which, in Homer,
is above even Jupiter. This master of gods and men declares roundly that
he cannot stop his son Sarpedon dying in his appointed time. Sarpedon
was born at the moment when he had to be born, and could not be born at
another moment; he could not die otherwise than before Troy; he could
not be buried elsewhere than in Lycia; had at the appointed time to
produce vegetables which had to be changed into the substance of a few
Lycians; his heirs had to establish a new order in his states; this new
order had to exert an influence over the neighbouring kingdoms; from it
resulted a new arrangement of war and peace with the neighbours of the
neighbours of Lycia: thus, step by step, the destiny of the whole world
has been dependent on Sarpedon's death, which depended on Helen being
carried off; and this carrying off was necessarily linked to Hecuba's
marriage, which by tracing back to other events was linked to the origin
of things.
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