CHAPTER TWO

THE FORCE OF IMAGES

It was about the year 2100 that popular libraries of “cinetexts” or “cinebooks” with moving images were established. Immediately before that era, a certain number of scientists, notably in Japan, had attracted attention to the psychopathic modifications made to the human mind, particularly in young people, by the immoderate usage of the old cinema. It is alleged today that the toxicity of high doses of alcohol, opium and peyotl—and, in general, all substances capable of poisoning the intelligence, vision or will, as well as hearing and touch—involved the uncoordinated release of images. Each of them, in fact, has an organic and cellular respondent; and the state of judgment and reason, which is that of the equilibrium and order of images, is also that of the health of our tissues. In the same way, the state of disequilibrium or of unreason, raging from simple light-headedness and the partial collapse of common sense to characteristic alienation, has its physical correspondences and symptoms.

What is an internal image? It is a phantom, or, more exactly, a fragment of a hereditary phantom, of that which we call a personimage.7 Do we not say that we “evoke” an image, just as we say that one “evokes” a phantom? Whether it comes from within, from the depths of ancestral memory, or from without, an image is never indifferent, but it is much more active when it is artificially provoked.

Desirous of taking account of the influence of the cinebook on our organism and evaluating the thesis of Professor Eustache, I went to the municipal library during the initial ravages of the Napus and asked for two works: the account of the battle of the Marne in 1914 by Dominé, with moving illustrations by Courtille, which is a masterpiece of that particular genre and whose establishment in 2200 required the expenditure of three million francs; and the cinebook of Shakespeare’s Othello featuring Cawfort and Helen Harvey. I will tell you now what I experienced, and what any individual, even a Polyplast, handling those two admirable successes of cinetypography, would doubtless have experienced too.

The first moving image in Dominé’s classic work represents an episode, reconstituted in bookish film, of the famous retreat of Charleroi, when the French armies recoiled, harried by the German troops. There is a long file of infantrymen, artillerymen, field pieces, ammunition boxes and wagons, in the landscapes of the Pas-de-Calais, the Somme and the Oise, which have obviously not changed since the last Franco-German War, and which have recovered their ancient character after so many devastations. There is the same life, the same confused, tragic, ingenious life of the retreat and its alarms.

There results, in the spectators of all these faces and horizons, an exaltation that cannot be procured in any fashion by the immobile illustrations of old, which now seem like dead things, desiccated leaved, regardless of the artistry of the illustrator. When one thinks that even the prints and etchings of a Rembrandt have taken on a cadaverous aspect!

Yes, but when five or six animated plates have passed successively before my eyes, nervous fatigue intervenes, an oculo-cerebral fatigue of a particular quality, in which it seems that the entire intellectual system is impoverished by the articulation or conjunction of the illustration and that which it invokes. The mental depression is the same as that of a runner who, having prepared for a jump of several meters, has only to surpass sixty centimeters in one bound. That is because the illusion increasingly ceases to deceive us as it becomes stronger.

If such an impression grips me, habituated as I am by science and the laboratory to resist all kinds of shocks, what must it be like for simple folk, or people who are young, and therefore excitable and malleable! There is nothing extraordinary in the fact that after some four generations—from 2100 to 2227—these defects of personality have led to an internal corrosion, susceptible to degenerate into aphanasia, or death without remains, if one adds to it the effects of electromagnetic wear and tear alleged in parallel by Sidoine.

With regard to the cinetext of Shakespeare’s Othello, the fatigue or nervous corrosion procured by the contemplation and mediation of that fine work is of a more complex type, doubtless even more redoubtable. In fact, the convoluted composition that is characteristic of Shakespearean genius had embodied in the settings and dialogue of that celebrated drama passionate seeds that had not borne all their flowers and fruits until the moment when the art of the cinetextualist permitted them to develop.

There is no doubt in my mind, especially since the mental shock of recent events, that the acting, already so subtle, of Cawfort and Helen Harvey is further multiplied in efficiency and depth by the transposition of their attitudes and physiognomies into the films of animated illustration. We grasp all the perfidy of Iago, all the voluptuous tenderness of Desdemona, all the roots of the cruel jealousy of the absurd Moor—but that perfection of the rendering, that restitution and renaissance, in our souls, of the overwhelming imaginative labor of Shakespeare—a demon posed at the intersection of centuries and the mysteries that surround us—all raises us to a height where we lose our breath, and from which we fall disabled and exhausted.

In other words, before the invention of moving illustration, the eye only gave the mind a excitation in rapport with its tonus or capacity; instead of which, since the advent of cinetext, the eye informs the mind superabundantly, to the point of making it exceed its limits, which are rather narrow in the common run of mortals, especially in young people and children.

Once again, I grasped the falsity of the principle—which has become a dogma—by virtue of which every scientific advance is necessarily beneficial. Humans have adapted, over the ages, to a certain proportion of ignorance and a certain variation, or variance, of knowledge, which cannot be exceeded without damage, either in one direction or the other. All we terrestrials are, in a certain measure, the barrel of the Danaides; as novelties, complications and so-called progress fill us on one side, we empty on another; and that which flees from us, or through us, is often more important that that which we acquire. Then again, in the domain of acquisition, there may be excess and abuse, even without ulterior particular toxicity, and then it is the mental machine itself that gives way, dragging the corporeal machine with it.

At least, that is my opinion, ripened in the society, or confronted with that, of my colleagues.

While I was at the cinetext library I saw an amorous couple arrive, young and well-matched, doubtless fiancés, who asked for a copy of Manon Lescaut, with the moving engravings of Valruve d’Agen. I pretended to be absorbed in the study of the battle of the Marne, after having returned Othello, the choice of which would have put them on the alert.

In writing his masterpiece long ago, amid a host of unreadable novels, Abbé Prévost had had a multitude of amorous images within him, regulated according to a certain cadence, which, giving the impression of sensual fatality, gave rise to the exquisite merit of his book. Beneath those images, and the words designed to render them sensible, there were others—as in Shakespeare’ Othello—supporting or accompanying them, which the mobile illustrations of Valrive d’Agen render manifest and gripping to us. It is as if the poem of love were enlarged and vivified beyond its written and printed disturbance. That augmentation of a work already beautiful appeared in the gazes of the two lovers, who sometimes contemplated the delicate and nuanced films and sometimes sought one another and exchanged glances charged with a renewed ardor.

I waited curiously to see what would result from such a nervous tension: an abandonment to the excessively intoxicating book, as in Dante’s immortal verses, or a drowsiness, or a quarrel. It was the soporific effect that carried them away. After having looked at four or five figures, which restored for them the burning and bitter life of the inconstant beauty and her cavalier, their faces leaned over the table, doubly radiant by virtue of their features, and what their mutual love added to their features, and they went to sleep in delight beside one another.

The librarian said to me, smiling: “It’s not the first time that’s happened. I certainly won’t wake them up. They’re enjoying the dreams of gold; the dreams of lead will come soon enough.”

I asked him, laughing, if he was personally familiar with all the treasures of his animated library. He gave me this typical reply: “Certainly, when I first came here, I had a great curiosity regarding the cinetextual works of which I heard so much talk, and as soon as library closed—at six o’clock in summer and four o’clock in winter—I took out a book and started the illustrations moving. What delight! But I soon perceived that my pleasure, which sometimes approached happiness—yes, Monsieur—was having a deleterious effect on my health. At night, I dreamed that the figures were dancing once again before my gaze, and by day, they were superimposed on the external spectacle and even upon my humble reflections—I mean those related to my job. Soon my lassitude was such that, after the passage of a vitalized engraving, I remained as if petrified, incapable of closing the library or of preparing my meal. That’s why I stopped.…”

As he pronounced those final words, I heard a little click, similar to the click of a badly-greased lock, which was unmistakable once one’s eardrum had registered it. At the same time, the amorous young man disappeared, as if snatched by avid eternity in the midst of tenderness.

“Oh, oh, oh!” said the librarian, in three different tones, which ranged from surprise to terror.

The young woman woke up, thought that her companion had left her there, in front of the exemplary movement of the perfidious Manon, and went pink with shame—but a pink like the flower. The sparse expression on the face of the worthy librarian gave her no suspicion of an event that she had never experienced before. She got up with an adorable gesture of confusion and simply said, but with an intonation quite different from that of the little girl in the Champs-Élysées: “He’s gone. That’s not polite.…”

At that moment I imagined that she was about to start searching vainly in all possible directions, alarming family and friends, for someone she would never see again; that she would consume her young and delicate existence in the alternation of hope and despair—and thought that it was not permissible for me to conceal from her a truth that the librarian also understood, to judge by his distressed features. The latter, who was not a Polyplast, and thus subject to the dream of destruction, witnessing a Napus for the first time, experienced a disturbance of grimacing form that altered his features in a particular way.

“Mademoiselle,” I said. “I’m Polyplast 17,177 of the Aristotle Foundation. That title, which might not mean anything to you, is that of a biologist specializing in cases of aphanasia, or Napus. Your friend has just disappeared. We witnessed it, this gentleman and myself.”

“Disappeared…?” she said. “But how? And what do you mean by aphanasia, or Napus?”

I was taken aback in my turn; it was difficult for me to conceive that the fuss made about the new plague had not reached the ears of a person who, to all appearances, belonged to an excellent family. The cinetext librarian seemed as astonished as me by that blissful ignorance.

I tried to explain briefly to the poor child what the death without remains was. She doubtless mistook me for a madman, because, in the middle of my explanation, she ran away on her agile legs, leaving behind an odor of carnation and jasmine. It might be that at the time of writing, she is still searching for her gallant canoodler—unless she has found another.

I was preparing to leave the library, but the functionary drew closer to me, as if to impart a confidence. “Since you are from the Aristotle Foundation, Monsieur 17,177, I will confess to you that I would prefer, after what has just happened, to exchange my present uniform for the coat of a technician in your laboratory. It seems to me that I’d be safer. These things attract the lightning.…”

His trembling finger indicated the cinebooks—which, on their gilded copper shelves, had indeed taken on a threatening aspect. He had certainly caught wind of thesis number three, attributing the Disease to extreme erosion by internal and external images, multiplied by moving illustration.

In order to reassure him and discourage him at the same time, I told him about the case of Mère Grégeois, napusified before my eyes, even though she was a pillar of our institute and a leading member of the prophylaxy committee.

He repeated, with a somber expression: “I sense that, if I stay here, it will end up happening to me.”

Personally, I was not very reassured either, for I observed that this was the fourth case that had occurred in my presence since the beginning of the epidemic. Was there, then, something about me that attracted the Faceless Death? I promised the librarian, however, that if my faithful Mouillemouillard should happen to disappear, by virtue of normal death or the Napus, I would take him on as the brave Lyonnais’ successor.

As he handed me my hat and cane, he said: “I’d also like to ask you, my dear Maître, what you find so funny about the total disappearance of a living being? I was struck by the fact that you laughed when that poor young man.…and yet you have a good heart, in your capacity as a scientist.”

Among the people, everyone is convinced that every man who works, especially in Science, has a good heart, while all idlers with private incomes are wicked. It’s a relic of Romanticism. I refrained from explaining to my interlocutor that ethnic confusion atrophies sensitivity, even the sensitivity of Polyplasts. I talked to him about nervous laughter, an insurmountable tic that desolated my existence—to effectively that he gradually lost his suspicious expression and resumed the attitude of great veneration that is the rule with regard to the depositories of Knowledge with a capital K.

On this subject, it’s necessary that I tell you an anecdote that illustrates a social condition.

One of the most inventive Polyplasts of our Foundation was also a poisoner, of rare perversity. It seemed that his criminal instinct was a function of his medical genius, or vice versa, for each of his discoveries corresponded to a crime bearing his hallmark, such that neither the police, not the magistrates, nor a jury could have any vestige of doubt. He was sentenced to death six times, but pardoned and set free every time, because people in high places wanted him to resume his occupations, so useful to suffering humankind. It was calculated that he had killed, amid his admirable endeavors, a hundred individuals of the two sexes. Now, he encountered on his path a saintly man who made him ashamed of his crimes, led him to repentance and even to perfect contrition, with the result that he renounced his phials of toxins and devoted himself to charity—for he had accumulated great wealth with his remedies and pharmaceutical specialties. Yes, but from the day he ceased poisoning people, he also ceased to invent, as if the two wellsprings, the benevolent and the malevolent, had dried up at the same time.

It appeared to me that the napusification of the reader of Manon Lescaut was the kind of thing that would interest Professor Eustache, to whom I paid a visit in his magnificent town house in the Rue de Monsieur, filled with fake Old Masters and antique furniture forged by skillful cabinet-makers.

Pale and glabrous, the scientist in question, to whom we owe the most beautiful studies of the “corporeality of images” and hereditary memory, received me eagerly, and became totally livid—in him, a sign of anxiety—when he discovered the objective of my visit. He had a long nose, thin lips and a high forehead, somewhat reminiscent of Dante. He was reputed to detest Polyplasts, but he gave no sign of it to me.

Naturally, in his view, Professor Ailette’s cellular explanation was untenable, as was Sidoine’s electromagnetic explanation. He had been told by the Prefect of Police, his nephew, that thirty per cent of cases of Napus had been produced in habitués of the municipal library and the Bibliothèque Nationale—which is to say, cinebook readers—but I found out subsequently that the nephew had massaged the statistic in order to please his uncle, a bachelor on whose inheritance he was counting.

Eustache told me that a great debate was about to take place at the Académie de Médecine, in which he would participate, along with Ailette, Sidoine, a German professor named Murmelthier, an English professor named Morrow, an American professor named Harold-Feller, a Spanish professor named Ladilla, a Japanese professor named Kasavigata, a Russian professor named Broussoloff, and an Italian professor named Salvibianchi.

“Just as long as the death without remains doesn’t choose that fine meeting to exercise its ravages,” I said, innocently.

That simple remark had an extraordinary effect on my eminent colleague. In fact, by virtue of studying images and their action on the organism, he had developed an unusual sensitivity to any mental representation translatable into words. Large drops of sweat formed on his forehead and ran down his cheeks and nose. He was extremely pale, like the fresh “roughcast” plaster that masons apply with a trowel. He was having difficulty breathing. I wondered whether he might be about to furnish me with another example of aphanasia right there and then.

“Do you think,” he said to me, in a halting voice, “that the fact of occupying oneself medically with the Napus is capable of favoring the appearance of the Plague among those who study it? That comes within the scope of my studies of imaginative pathology. It’s a question I’m asking myself.”

I explained to him that I had observed, some weeks earlier, the first authentic Parisian case of death without remains, and that I had witnessed several others—but that I was still here, and even, as the slang term has it “all there.”

“That’s because you’re also a Polyplast, and thus especially armored against the aggression of images,” the Master replied, with a sigh, “for I don’t believe in either a particular fragility of your tissues or an exceptional metabolism of your cells. But if there were the least presumption of such a risk, I’d immediately call off the Académie debate. Shall I admit to you that I have no fear of any malady, old or new, colonial or metropolitan, epidemic or otherwise, contagious or otherwise—but that aphanasia scares me? It’s unexpected, it’s annihilation, it’s the void, the desert, the inexplicable—in brief, it’s frightful.”

In saying that, the professor, celebrated for his harshness with regard to humans and animals, the pitiless vivisector, who had every right to bear the name of a knife,8 had adopted the expression of a fearful and quivering Dante, menaced by all the demons of the infernal “bolges.”

Wiping away the salty stickiness of his sudoriferous glands, he continued, in a more confident tone: “Would you ever have imagined that a man like me, who doesn’t believe in anything except the force of images—the annotator of Lucretius, the figurehead of the New Materialism—would light a candle at Notre-Dame des Victoires to deflect the plague away from me? That, however, is what I’ve done. Yes, my dear chap, I went, secretly, to beg for my survival, for the few years that remain for me to drag my package of cells around down here, with their magnetic centers and their congenital impressionability. There was an enormous crowd in that ancient church, before the flickering candles, as, I suppose, there was in the year one thousand, since the terrors of the millennium have come back again—but seriously motivated this time. I’d undoubtedly been seen, but I made myself scarce. The important thing, for me, is not to dissolve into nothing at all after that little click…oh, what horror!”

I thought that I ought to make the observation that practitioners do not catch all the ailments of their clientele, and that many reach a ripe old age, after having consigned to the grave a multitude of invalids of both sexes.

He answered me volubly: “Disillusion yourself, my dear Polyplast 17,177, and ask your comrade Poly 14,026 to inform you of the very curious statistics that he has compiled on this subject. The more time goes by, the more susceptible a man who cares for others becomes to the afflictions of those for whom he cares.

“Two hundred years ago, specialists in malignant tumors only developed cancer in a proportion of one in a thousand, which did not permit any distinction to be made between pure coincidence and contagion—but today, by virtue of the accumulated and somatic penetration of images”—he emphasized the word somatic—“the proportion is ten per thousand, which is becoming disquieting. It’s the same with diabetes.

“So, is it permissible to ask, before a disease as sudden, unexpected, and overwhelming as the Napus, whether the mere fact of occupying oneself with it, of being impregnated by the thought of it, might not predispose one’s tissues to the instantaneous disaggregation that it signifies?

“As for that fool Ailette’s preventive cellular broth, you can take it for granted that it’s as effective as Perlimpinpin’s powder or the serums of the 1920s. Oh, that Ailette would take the gold off a chair-leg or a tear from an orphan, as they say where I come from.”

I knew that Eustache was an enthusiastic collector, a great lover of reproductions of tapestries, copies of paintings, pseudo-antique silver and supposedly-precious furniture, and I tried to guide the conversation on to that terrain, in order to give him a chance to get a grip on himself, but he interrupted with profound sighs the questions I asked him about the fakes, knick-knacks, curios and items of bric-à-brac that crafty merchants had sold him, or the supposedly twentieth-century sideboards, the Goyas fabricated in Montrouge and the fifty-franc Pissarros that had been “a steal” at forty-five thousand.

Emerging from the house of that Prince of Medicine slightly weary of my scientific colleagues and comrades, I headed for the Palais de Justice, which today takes up the entire area between Notre-Dame and the Louvre, by reason of its formidable growth, due to the extension of courts and tribunals.

The Place Dauphiné has become an interior courtyard, the Pont Henri IV an interior bridge—the Seine passing through the Palais—and the buildings destined for the use of the legal profession resume on the right bank, extending as far as the Rue de Rivoli. A small electric tram links the various sectors of that gigantic caravanserai, which is nevertheless twenty times smaller than those of New York and Sydney.

The number of advocates and judges has multiplied tenfold since the year 2000, in proportion to that of trials and quibbles of every sort and the superimposition of electrical, magnetic, industrial, commercial, economic and international Codes, extending almost to infinity the thorns and thickets of procedure, in spite of the attempts at simplification made by ingenious jurists.

I was able to observe, as soon as I arrived among the wigs and gowns, busily employed or standing around in groups chatting, that the great topic of conversation was the terrible Napus. In this realm there had only been some sixty victims thus far, but prominent ones, including three presidents of the Court of Appeal and eight counselors of the Court of Cassation “blown away” in the course of hearings, seventeen preliminary magistrates and assessors, and three examining magistrates. The Bar had been spared thus far, hence the dictum that it was necessary to await the Disease standing up rather than seated. It was said, however, that the Public Prosecutor was already more dead than alive and that the King’s Prosecutors were in a bad way before the trembling of their chief. The result of that was an immense confusion in matters pending, which had spread to the clerks, the judiciary identity services, the judiciary police and the special police—to such an extent that thefts, murders and other violent crimes were multiplying in cities in the most disquieting fashion, overwhelming the local commissariats and the services of the Sûreté in general.

But these consequences were trivial as yet, compared to the upheavals that the death without remains had brought to jurisprudence and legislation—principally in matters of inheritance and certifications, civil and otherwise—which had not been foreseen, with good reason. That was what old magistrates with the heads of eunuchs or gorillas, their eyes obscured by cataracts, were rabbiting on about, surrounded by young lawyers, like lumps of rotting meat by buzzing flies, as far as the eye could see.

Some kept their arms in front of them while others held them behind their backs, inflating the sleeves of their robes as in the drawings of the great Daumier and Forain, which have traversed the centuries without growing old. Some burst into forced laughter, above their bulging briefcases. Others, putting on grave expressions, drew colleagues away by the shoulders as if to make them some important confidence—but the secret in question was bunkum or the produce of Mr. Punch, which would return to him. Yet others could be seen leaning on walls, legs buckled, shaking their heads like waiting horses in the days when horses waited. Circles of discussion formed, a few paces from other sordid circles, formed by the delinquents of common law, descended from police-vans, who were also talking about the Thing in low voices, as if they feared awakening and attracting upon themselves its blind rage.

As soon as I was perceived by some of my former comrades and neighbors from the École de Droit I was recognized and grabbed. I had acquired a certain notoriety of late, not because of my work at the Aristotle Foundation, nor my situation as a Polyplast, but by virtue of the fact that I had been a witness of the first authentic and verified case of the Napus. I was obliged to recount, for the hundredth time, the exclamation of the little girl who had baptized the death without remains, the disappearance of Mère Grégeois and that of the young man of the cinetexts. It was necessary for me to explain, briefly but precisely, the theses of Ailette, Sidoine and Eustache and reply to various objections raised by those quibblers, accustomed to splitting hairs into eight or sixteen and arguing about terms.

The announcement of the international debate at the Académie de Médecine caused a sensation.

One might imagine, in fact, that various opinions set in deliberation, might resolve a difficult better than the solitary ripening of a single opinion—but that is contrary to the truth. When it is a matter of finding a median between different, and sometimes opposed, texts and articles, a congressional debate might perhaps have some utility, but if it is a matter of an immediate, menacing reality and a frank and prompt resolution, that can only be the affair of a single individual who imposes his point of view on others when it is time to act.

A president of an initial tribunal, very knowledgeable and artful, by the name of Palemon, made the observation that it would be easy for murderers and accomplices to get rid of someone, dispose of the body and then come to testify to his death without remains. “We now find ourselves, Messieurs, in the presence of a capital danger, of an encouragement to murder such as has never been known before. What is more redoubtable than aphanasia itself is the simulation of aphanasia.”

The circle approved, and everyone racked his brains in search of an appropriate solution—but no one could think of one. The optimists insisted that everything would settled down and that the first historical epidemic of the plague or cholera must have been far worse. The pessimists riposted that the Napus had a mysterious and universal character that exceeded the proportions and the level of an epidemic, and that the fate of the entire human race was at stake. Everyone agreed in regretting that the protective penetration of human intelligence had not grown in proportion to the evils unleashed by the mechanical inventions of that same intelligence. There was a continual reversion to the formula: “It’s a pity that the qualitative has been allowed to be overtaken by the quantitative.”

There was a sudden stir among the lawyers; it was the Minister of Inventions, Tonqueloque, who had come to visit the Public Prosecutor, evidently with regard to the Napus.

Tonqueloque belonged very evidently to the quantitative genre, being primarily a mathematician, and as such accustomed to seeing everything from the viewpoint of the absolute, even though everything terrestrial is relative and that which is biological is malleable. Physically, he was a short stout man with neatly-brushed hair that might have been mistaken for a wig, a stammer and a squint that were irritated and confused by the slightest objection. I knew him well, having dealt with him on numerous occasions with regard to the inventions—ephemeral, I must admit—that inevitably emerge from the Aristotle Foundation, and which our envious rivals have baptized “five-minute discoveries.” Our characters were not compatible.

“Bonjour, Monsieur le Ministre.”

“Bonjour, my dear Poly 17,177. Do you have anything new with regard to the treatment of the Disease? What is the effect of Professor Ailette’s broth?”

That question had the effect of making the advocates and magistrates present—and Palemon most of all—laugh heartily. Tonqueloque adopted an irritated expression. “I don’t see, Messieurs, that there’s anything particularly cheerful about the present situation, and I must confess that it seems to me that serious questions ought to be treated seriously in the Palais de Justice.”

“Excuse me, Monsieur le Ministre,” said an old advocate by the name of Levert, who had a reputation as a joker. “We’re laughing at human impotence in the face of the new abyss that has opened beneath our feet. There’s no hilarity more philosophical.”

“It has occurred to me,” Tonqueloque said, without further insistence, “that there might be considerable scientific interest in recording the points at which the unfortunate aphanasics disappear and linking these points by a line on an appropriate map. One would thus obtain a curve that would not lack interest.”

That baroque idea, well worthy of a mathematical mind, increased everyone’s gaiety. Several put down their briefcases stuffed with files in order to dilate their rib-cages more easily. The clerks coming from all parts of the Palais to investigate the reasons for that joy already imagined that an irresistible means of combating the Disease had been found.

The Minister was bewildered. In order to say something, he added: “It might be the case that some kind of cellulo-explosive phenomenon, comparable to a limited tornado, is circulating on the surface of the planet, selecting its victims in accordance with a determined asymptote. That too is calculable.”

This time, the members of the audience split their sides. There is nothing more amusing than a individual behaving entirely in accordance with his character or temperament, in circumstances in which neither his character nor his temperament is apposite. That was the case with Tonqueloque.

He darted around a suspicious all-encompassing glance—that of a schoolteacher to whose back the pupils have attached a placard and is wondering which one to punish. Then, abruptly shrugging his shoulders and snorting, the Minister of Inventions headed for the Bar.

“Another case, Messieurs, another case!”

A plump and short individual, a clerk in the Court of Cassation, came toward us giving signs of terror. He explained, breathlessly, that Counselor Bienmanié had just disappeared, at the moment when he was sitting down at his table—the second on the right of the fourth criminal chamber—and reaching out for a file.

The new produced a certain emotion. Bienmanié had been charged, the previous day, with compiling a report on the juridical implications of the Death without Remains. The question that preoccupied Eustache was visible in every face: Does occupying oneself with it expose one to becoming subject to it?

“Oh, the poor boy”—Bienmanié had been seventy-five, and the term boy hardly suited him—“was reluctant to take charge of that dossier. Did he foresee what has happened?”

“No, it’s pure chance.”

“There is no chance.”

Click! At the very moment when the sturdy magistrate, by the name of Capechard, emitted that by-no-means original aphorism, the sound of the “detonator” resounded, and the speaker vanished into thin air without a puff of smoke, without a whiff of odor, without anything.

The case was magnificent and clear, but I did my best to suppress my desire to laugh, which would have further increased the terror of all those lawyers.

Now, by virtue of an antithesis that Victor Hugo—over there on the right—would have loved, four centuries earlier, who did we see coming down the steps from the Court of Cassation, in his robe as well as his fresh and blood? Bienmanié in person—Bienmanié, whom all his colleagues had already begun mourning, and whose aphanasia had just been announced to us: Bienmanié returned, like a coin in the hand of a conjurer, while Capechard disappeared in the same fashion.

The idea of an exchange imposed itself on all of us, and one magistrate, who was particularly keen on being decorated, ran after Tonqueloque, the involuntary joker, in order to bring him up to date with that marvelous substitution. It was the raw material for a new curve.

Then an improbable scene took place. Bienmanié, informed of the clerk’s error, abused the latter roundly, calling him a cretin and a fool, without the slightest regard for the minute’s silence generally accorded to the spirits of napusified individuals. It was a very amusing spectacle: the modest functionary, harassed by that black ape, who seemed ready to devour him and was accusing him of having sought to bring misfortune down upon him.

Superstition was manifestly entering into everyone’s soul.

At the same time as superstition, however, a new sentiment and a great tenderness invaded me.

Little subject until then to the assaults of amour upon my rational carapace, in my quality as a Polyplast, I felt that aberration opening up to me under the new threat of the Napus. I began to look more attentively at the pretty girls passing by in the street. If the lovely Henriette Tastepain was late at the laboratory, I became anxious about her, and her footsteps behind the glazed door caused my heart to beat faster.

I had previously read descriptions of that weakness in ancient and modern authors, which had seemed to me to be baroque and incompatible with the dignity of a seeker of knowledge; now, that opinion of my youth came to seem baroque, and I thought about making up for lost time.

I confided in my friend Poly 14,026, who, to my great surprise, admitted that he too felt internally modified since the advent of aphanasia, and had begun to wonder whether the most reasonable use of such a brief and precarious existence was the one we were making of it.

If we men of the laboratory were in that situation with regard to the blonde goddess to whom Lucretius had dedicated his poem,9 it is easily imaginable that the rest of the nation had preceded us, and gone further. Never had the bonds between lovers been more tender than since they had been threatened by rupture by the Napus. Never had the symphonic song of the nightingale, the little winged conductor of the orchestra that he constitutes all by himself, appeared so delightful to the ear when it rose up at the advent of night above a field of perfumed lilies. Never had the scent of roses, assembled in a host on a rose-bush like red fireworks, surprised the sense of smell with such heady effluvia. Never had the slightly bitter perfume of lavender on Provençal hillsides carried lads and lasses to the land of carnal dreams in a more sparkling chariot. Never had a young man in love sitting on a strand, in a hollow between the rocks, beneath the emerging stars, enjoyed more voluptuously the vague silhouette of the object of his love dangling her little feet in the lukewarm salty water of the tide, gradually and unsteadily coming in.

The martial thoughts that haunted us as a consequence of the mixture of polyplastic bloodlines and the laborious contention of the laboratory—for tense analytical thought embodies a battle—began to give way to these strange impulsions..

In brief, we were softening.

One strange and sweet day was the one that Henriette Tastepain and I spent in the woods at Meudon toward the end of July, three months after the debut of the plague.

In the belief of the ancient urbanists of the early twentieth century, and their predictions, since recognized as false, the continual westward development of Paris through Passy, Auteuil, the Point-du-Jour etc. ought to have annihilated and absorbed the forested region that extends from Meudon to Villebon and beyond, where great rural properties had been built in the seventeenth century. On the contrary, however, it was toward the east and the north that Paris had developed after the great industrial and rural development of the twenty-first century and the legal limitation of non-electrical and non-magnetic factories. In the direction of Sèvres and Meudon, the sinuous snaking of the capital had, in fact, retracted somewhat, the ugly buildings and hangars of the factories on the banks of the Seine between Sèvres and Saint-Cloud giving way to charming villas and “follies” recalling those of the eighteenth century, while general farmers reappeared in an new guise.

So, the sun was shining and the blue of the sky caused strollers to forget, in the immediate chamber of the mind, the quotidian preoccupation with the terrible menace. The progression was still accelerating, but the newspapers, on our advice, had adopted a palliative strategy and again announced a discovery of a particular kind, permitting the plague to be driven back.

Henriette was wearing new clothes, which made her and her supple, well-proportioned body into a parcel of harmonious enchantment, superimposed on nature. It seemed that we could hear a distant song, emerging from an irrational hope, as there is behind the simultaneously desolate and confident themes of the immortal Beethoven.

We followed the bank of the river—or, to put it better, the most spiritual river in the world—the banks of which form the so-called Île de France, a trifle cold in the Occitan parlance that is now so widespread again, but delightfully sinuous and sober. She and I were talking about the desiccation to which the overly-exclusive pursuit of the infinite and indefinite problems of science leads, and about the necessity, for the sake of equilibrium, of the free development of natural sentiments.

I would never have suspected, on the part of my brilliant assistant, such resources of fantasy, such a placid and serene vision of earthly things, or such a youthful generosity. It was a delight for me. She joked about our friend 14,026 and his uniquely book-based and documentary conception of the universe, all the Polyplasts of our acquaintance, and all our professors—the Ailettes, the Sidoines and the Eustaches. She mimicked their tics, their accents and their manias. I learned to experience a laughter that was no longer grating, which was not that of the recognition of human fatality, but which liberated the soul by traversing it with its mocking arrow and dragging it out of the icy regions of pure understanding.

I had not come to the woods of Meudon since my bleak and studious youth, by reason of the intensive labor to which Polyplasts are subjected. Our professors of geology had taken us there to the limestone quarries that contained, before the Deluge, specimens of flora and fauna classified, declassified and reclassified twenty times over according to contemporary geologico-biological hypotheses—but the old forest with its six-hundred-year-old trees belonged to lovers that day.

Hidden behind vast trunks enflamed by solar rays, lovers kissed with open mouths, in such a fashion that their faces disappeared, as if swallowed up by their kisses. Others pecked as they went along, arms around one another’s waists in the fashion of peasant-women, or held one another by the little finger while walking a few steps ahead of their distracted parents, waiting to give them the slip in order to exchange their saliva avidly. They could be seen in the depths of thickets, looking one another in the eyes, without touching, with glowing and eager faces. They could be seen, intimidated by the entirely new sensation of reckless kissing replacing language, holding timid but heated discussions.

Here, a fiancé told a blushing fiancée how things would work out, when he had a job with a salary, and what the sumptuous menu of the wedding-feast would be. There, lying on the ground, each chewing a twig in order to make themselves look cool, a blond and a brunette were laughing because they were finally together in spite of the malignity of gossips, having the day to themselves. Some became sulky, but only briefly, in order to make up and be closer bound together. One girl extended a slender ear, like a little pink sea-shell, to receive a confidence, while another wagged a menacing finger, doubtless in response to a risqué suggestion, the risk of which was nevertheless exquisite.

The game of blind man’s buff over to the left, in the clearing sown with yellow roundels, with a simpleton whose eyes were bandaged, seemed the very image of amorous pursuit; while the game of tag that the children were playing permitted the brush of hands and fingers that is the Devil’s first temptation.

Such an atmosphere and such sights were well-calculated to induce desire in Henriette and myself. The plague was far away. Another scourge, this one adorable, was soliciting us, making our hearts beat in our bosoms and causing our desires to quiver like leaves in a warm breeze.

I took hold of the young woman’s round arm and held it tenderly against my own. She let me do it. I drew closer to her.

Half a dozen couples, similarly occupied and busy with the great business, who surrounded us, served better than solitude to conceal that nascent joy. We confronted the pulsation of our arteries and our lips came together, touching, at the rapid velocity of thought, like two swallows flying in the open air toward a common goal and confusing their wing-beats. I must confess that never had such delights presented themselves to me, even distantly, during my scientific research. Don’t tell me that it’s a matter of opposed orders of meditation; the organism is one and does not react in a different fashion to the curiosity of intelligence and that of the flesh.

After that experiment, beneath the decreasing fires of the day, we didn’t say a word. The eternal speech of lovers, with its first person singular, was itself postponed until later. We were reciprocally astonished to have waited so long—long months in daily contact—for the birth of an admission. I recalled certain ironic glances on the part of Mouillemouillard, certain joking allusions on the part of 14,026.

At the end of a sloping path, in the form of a kind of leafy country inn, the classic tastes of the environs of Paris solicited us: a glass of cold, light beer, a lightly-seasoned sausage, of which it was sufficient to remove the skin to dispel the ashy taste analogous to that of dull existence; and a hunk of fresh bread with a slight scent of wheat, although it was a crusty child of the immediate suburb. While the blissful discoverer of the fifth magnetic center of the cell employed her beautiful teeth I observed the charming oval of her jaw, well-articulated by hunger, laughter and love, delightedly.

We decided to dine in one of the small inns that have fortunately replaced the insipid palaces of old and honor the immutable dishes of the Parisian region, such as entrecote with “melted apples”—which don’t melt—and fish in the vinegary and incomparable Bercy sauce, surmounted by a pat of odorous butter. With love and the love of food—the only true ones—we had conquered the world at a single stroke.

But it has to be said that the day did not end without hiccups. As we set forth again, chatting about things of no consequence, to which we would not have given any thought the day before, we suddenly perceived a group of walkers who had stopped at the corner of a path in front of an object that we took at first for a hut.

It was a monstrous mushroom, three meters high, with the inflated foot of the edible mushroom and a cap under which a dozen people could have taken shelter from a storm.

An old warden explained to me that the phenomenon had grown there in the space of a single night. He added that, according to the “messieurs” from the botanical laboratory at Bellevue who had come to examine it the day before, it was a question of the same mysterious force that was making people disappear without trace. At that revelation, a black veil passed over the beautiful gilded dusk. Lovers of both sexes, as if sobered up, gazed at the sinister cryptogam in a melancholy fashion, which, obtaining its advantage from the same mysterious power that annihilated humans, had been turned into a giant by the Napus.

“Don’t get too close, Mesdames et Messieurs! It’s said that it’s not contagious, but all the same—one never knows!”

A dozen children, boys and girls ran up, laughing and jostling one another. At the sight of the fungal giant they became ecstatic, uttering cries of joy; then, holding hands, they started an infernal round-dance around its immense foot, to the rhythm of a popular song. The doubtless-philosophical warden hesitated momentarily as to whether to prevent them from mocking the monster, then reflected that the napusic explanation was doubtful and let the innocents have their way.

But the explanation was sound.

We soon learned, in fact, via telegrams sent from all points of the nation and various countries of Europe, that cryptogams of colossal size were appearing in various locations, accomplishing their growth overnight. There was no great harm in that, while it was a matter of edible mushrooms, although people hesitated nevertheless to cook them, for fear that their exorbitant dimensions might nauseate the most determined gourmets. As soon it was question of fly-agarics or amanitas, however, and the redouble spectrum of ink-caps, the fear was that the enormous receptacles of poison might poison, as they rotted, the ground in which they were growing.

In addition, clumps of these phenomena, attaining four or five meters in height and ten or twelve in circumference, appeared in places where it was not usual to encounter them, principally in the suburbs. Bourg-la-Reine, Clamart and Pantin were the worst-afflicted locales, in proportions such that the inhabitants had difficulty negotiating certain streets, which were completely obstructed.

Samples of these giants of the vegetal world were, of course, sent to the Foundation, where we analyzed them conscientiously, without discovering anything abnormal from a chemical or anatomical viewpoint. Ailette saw them as a reinforcement of his cellular hypothesis, Sidoine as support for his electromagnetic thesis. Eustache asserted that the two strange phenomena were completely unrelated—but it was evident to any mind deprived of prejudice that the relationship was close, and that the Napus, which was inimical to humans, stimulated growth and magnification in cryptogams.

That was an impenetrable mystery—and what else was going to happen?

For several weeks great botanists were seen running from one side of the country to the other: mysterious and manic individuals who were neither numerous not communicative, who usually toyed in silence with the Latin and Greek names that they applied to all the species of the vast vegetal realm. Their explanations did not differ sensibly from those of physiologists, cytologists and others, and were no more satisfactory to the intelligence.

As for the propagation of the Napus, it was neither relented nor diminished by that hypertrophic deviation, and the curve that we tracked on a daily basis, with scrupulous statistical care, continued its ascendant progress.

7. I have transcribed this neologism directly, as the author would have used a different term had he wanted to signify the equivalent of the English “personality” or “self-image.” Daudet was fond of improvising new words from Classical roots, and the reader will encounter several more in the course of the text.

8. In French, “eustache” is a slang term for a clasp-knife or a cut-throat razor.

9. The reference is to De rerum natura [On the Nature of Existence], the classic of skeptical Epicurean philosophy, which begins with a dedicatory invocation of Venus.