The Fourth Personal Sojourn of Beelzebub on the Planet Earth

“This Menitkel then became a learned being, firstly
because his childless aunt was an excellent what is called matchmaker and mixed a great deal with power-possessing beings, and secondly, because when by age he was approaching the ‘threshold of the being’ of a responsible being, he received on his birthday a gift of a book entitled Manual of Bon Ton and Love Letter Writing. Being materially secure and therefore quite free, thanks to an inheritance left him by his uncle, a former pawnshop proprietor, he out of boredom compiled a massive and erudite work in which he ‘spun out,’ concerning the origin of these apes, an elaborate theory with every kind of ‘logical proof,’ but of course with such ‘logical proofs’ as could be perceived and crystallized only in the Reasons of those freaks who have taken your fancy.

“This Menitkel then ‘proved’ by his theory that these ‘fellow apes’ of theirs had descended neither more nor less than from what are called ‘people who became wild.’

“And the other terrestrial beings of that period, as it had already become proper to them, implicitly believed this ‘Auntie’s darling’ without any essence-criticism whatsoever, and from that time on, this question which had then agitated the strange Reason of your favorites, became a subject of discussion and fantasying, and existed right up to what is called the ‘seventh-in-turn great general planetary process of reciprocal destruction.’

“Thanks to this maleficent idea, there was even fixed in the instincts of most of these unfortunates at that period still another abnormal what is called ‘dictatory factor,’ which began to engender in their common presences the false feeling that these ape-beings were presumably ‘sacred’; and the abnormal factor engendering this sacrilegious impulse, also passing by inheritance from generation to generation, has reached the instincts of very many beings even of the present time.

272