CHAPTER FOUR

A DELAY OF A HUNDRED HOURS

On Monsieur de La Renaudière’s orders, I immediately apprised Sidoine of von Tschuppe’s ultimatum.

Sidoine was the very type specimen of the twenty-third-century scientist and, although not a Polyplast, was animated by sentiments as harsh as mine had been before the walk in the woods at Meudon. In addition, that which he took to be the scientific truth acquired, in his eyes, the status of dogma. He would rather kill himself and set fire to the planet than deny one his “principles,” of which the mean duration was between thirty and forty years—for although carp live for five hundred years, and elephants and eagles between a hundred and a hundred and fifty, the best and most seductive medical and biological theories rarely achieve half a century of existence.

At the first word of protest, that brown-haired colossus would cry: “The cause is good! It is that of humanity. The worst enemies of humankind, it is evident today, are electricity, magnetism and wave-transmission. In those infernal machines, which we gladly did without for so many centuries, lurked the Devil of theology. If war has to result from our refusal, never has any holier or more just war been accepted for the salvation of the human species.”

Naturally, however, Ailette and Eustache, similarly alerted in their capacity as members of the Great Scientific Council, did not share this opinion. “Sidoine,” they said, in substance, “has won, by surprise tactics, a terribly dangerous vote, a vote whose diplomatic and military consequences can now be glimpsed, but whose economic and financial consequences will be no less disastrous, for it is the entire industry that is at stake. Electricity, at the present time, is the very foundation of industry. To renounce it is to renounce all industrial progress, all improvement. A return to steam engine is a return to barbarity, the abandonment of speed, the collapse of civilization. Besides, that is not the true cause of the Napus; it is either the cellular deterioration of cyton or erosion by images.”

Thus was thrown as fodder to the passions of crowds and groups a question of pure medicine—which, it is true, contradicted everything we knew regarding the supposed indestructibility of matter.

In case of war the Polyplasts, of whom I was one, could choose between the laboratories of the rear, in which the most modern methods of destruction and homicidal improvements were tried out, or the laboratories of the front, in which new treatments and the latest models of prosthetic apparatus were developed.

In the latter instances, which all relied on electricity, a amendment of the Sidoine law was anticipated, for there could evidently be know question of going back to the wooden legs, mechanical arms, false noses and other barbarities that were the lot two hundred years ago of cripples and the victims of mutilation wounded in the series of Franco-German, Germano-English, Germano-Italian etc. wars that periodically desolate the world. But had Sidoine reflected that the electrical and wave-based mechanisms necessitated by present-day prostheses presumed giant installations, themselves susceptible, according to him, of provoking and bringing about death without remains? The suppression of the latter entailed the suppression of the former.

A telephone call from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs charged Sidoine with summoning to the Aristotle the principal proprietors of scientific and political newspapers, in order to acquaint them with the redoubtable eventuality and to request them to stimulate public opinion. Once again, I was admitted to the meeting of these important individuals in my capacity as the first observer of the Napus and my “special competence.” That was how I made the acquaintance of the potentates of the press, who were evidently less ostentatious than their equivalent in the era of democracy and so-called enlightenment, but remained arrogant and quarrelsome beneath their external obsequiousness.

Noirpelat was there, who had formed a monopoly of the dailies of the north and the Parisian region, Tavejus, who controlled the west and center. Tiqueton, who concentrated the press in the east, and Barouille, who commanded the press in the south. The first had the hirsute physiognomy of a wild boar, and pronounced his ss and cs as xs while talking to his deerskin boots. The second was short and thin, as if boneless, with a jaundiced, ferret-like face. The third had a nose like a toucan, set in the middle of a timid face between blinking eyes. Barouille was the most sympathetic, beneath a rain of gray-blond hair, with the face of a satirist, as if carved in spongy wood.

The members of that quartet, on learning of the German ambassador’s ultimatum, were not pleased.

Noirpelat, who seemed to be the shrewdest, was in favor of trying to gain time and requesting, to that effect, an extension of the delay of a hundred hours. “It’s very little,” he said. “A hundred hours, to organize that—it would require at least a week.”

Sidoine observed to him politely that such a request might bring forth a refusal that would spoil everything.

Tavejus proposed the request for arbitration that is the resource of all cowards. By comparison with him, England was decisive.

Barouille objected, however, that preliminary hesitation with regard to the Sidoine law, as Morrow and the British government showed, was mere procrastination.

As for Tiqueton, who was incapable of forming an opinion and, for good reason, of putting one into action, he contented himself with giving his astonishing nose different inclinations and articulating nasal sounds. Spending his days in an automobile and his nights in bars and casinos, he was dying for fear at the thought of the Napus, war, death, with or without remains and any kind of responsibility.

There was no situation more comical than that of that poor fellow, placed by destiny at the head of an organ printing three million copies a day. Women said to him: “you’re handsome and your nose is driving me crazy; give me ten thousand-franc bills.” Men said to him: “you have an astonishing flair as well as an astonishing nose; lend me ten thousand francs.” Policemen said to him: “If you don’t give us ten thousand francs, we’ll put you in prison.” Anarchists said to him: “If you don’t give us ten thousand francs, we’ll blow up your bolt-hole.” Magistrates said to him: “If you don’t put ten thousand francs on our desk, we’ll render judgment against you.” Doctors said to him: “If you don’t hand over ten thousand francs, we’ll let you die in bed.” The syndicate of master blackmailers only guaranteed him civil peace against a weekly payment of ten thousand francs to the fund for master blackmailers in need. Tradesmen would only deliver to him for ten thousand francs what others bought for a hundred. Thus was Tiqueton the wealthy taxed, in the midst of a life in glorious bloom and a bush of gilded thorns.

None of these important proprietors ever set foot in his newspaper’s offices, Noirpelat for fear of a request of question from his editor in chief to which he would be unable to reply, Tavejus for fear of a slap in the face—he had, it seemed, received a thousand in ten years—Tiqueton for fear of a demand for another ten thousand francs, and Barouille because the press did not interest him and he occupied himself with the art of dentistry to pass the time. He liked putting gold fillings in the molars of his friends, his domestics and his concierge, and he collected stumps.

Sidoine’s knowledge of these particularities enabled him to win these powerful interlocutors to his cause. He captured Noirpelat by means of vanity, Tavejus by means of dread, Tiqueton by means of timidity and Barouille by means of flattery.

It was agreed that the German threat would be brought to the attention of the French public the following day, but in a courteous tone that would be maintained until it was absolutely certain that the war could not be avoided. It was also understood that the press, as a whole, would further emphasize the unanimous vote of the conference—apart from Germany and England—with regard to the Sidoine law, which indicated the value attached to the said project by the qualified representatives of all the nations of the world. By opposing such a forceful measure, the only one capable of combating the plague, Germany was once more setting itself up as an enemy of the human species.

Before the conspirators separated, the four proprietors asked me to draft a common note, objective and exclusively scientific in appearance, setting out the facts and the facts alone. I did that right away. This is the note:

The recent session of the Conference of the Combined Academies and Institutes devoted to the Napus concluded with a plan for an international law drawn up by Professor Sidoine and endorsed by all the nations except two. One of the other two nations, England, simply adjourned its adherence and its signature, for reasons of propriety related to its Dominions. The Sidoine law, considering all electrical, magnetic and wave-emitting installations to be the principal, if not the only cause, of the terrible plague, decrees their immediate suppression. The practical regulation of that law, which thus becomes the charter of the civilized world, will be promulgated one hundred hours from now, under the auspices of the Aristotle Institute—where, of course, Professor Ailette’s antinapusic broth can still be purchased.

The “one hundred hours from now” agreed with Minister La Renaudière was simply an indirect response to the German ultimatum.

However, the bankers and financiers independent of banks—who were even more redoubtable—of the two worlds, who had money invested in wave-transmitting and other installations, had immediately rallied to von Tschuppe’s German thesis, and their orders to the press trusts, which they controlled to a greater or lesser degree, flatly contradicted those of the government.

Caught between the necessities of the Bourse, linked themselves to the necessity of purchasing immense quantities of paper, and the fear of disobeying La Renaudière, Noirpelat, Tavejus, Tiqueton and Barouille took the course of publishing, pell-mell on the same pages, both sets of press releases. Column two gave the lie to column three, which was itself contradicted by column four.

Favored by the rapidity of means of communication whose prohibition was demanded by the Sidoine law, a deluge of false news began to rain down, soaking the reality and transforming it into a sticky mire of tall stories.

It was in these circumstances that the benefits of the monarchic institution became clear and salutary, as the only one capable of counterbalancing, by means of a fixed axis and continuous action, the zigzags of popular passion and brute interests.

American democracy, however, warned by its war with Japan a century earlier but not cured of its errors, passed more edicts, with a flick of the wrist and in the space of a hundred hours, than it would have been possible to apply in ten years—for it was the habit, in the United States, to replace laws with edicts, and codes by codices of a sort, full of bothersome prescriptions.

It is necessary to recognize, nevertheless, that fear of the Napus was, for the government in Washington, the commencement of wisdom, and that it declared itself ready to break the contracts of all the electrical and wave-emitting companies overnight, just as, three hundred years earlier, it had prohibited all fermented beverages, including wine. The Anglo-Saxons like tours de force, moral and otherwise, in whatever direction they present themselves. An individual who drinks seven liters of wine a day—which is the case in vine-growing countries, and not a few of our compatriots—delights them as much as an individual who does not touch a drop of wine or spirits from birth to the age of a hundred.

The independent financiers, whose institution does not go back more than a century, are specialists in matters of monetary exchange, transfer, stabilization and revaluation, which relieve nations in difficulty, collapsing establishments and private fortunes gone adrift with decisive advice. They are, in sum, the physicians of gold, enjoying as honoraria, commissions of thirty per cent on the capital engaged. Freed from all the inconveniences necessitated by the multiple, and sometimes adventurous, operations of great credit institutions, their heads are freed for calculations, ingenious methods and risks that, like currents of thirty thousand volts, pass through the organism without harming it.

There was a case, three centuries ago, of an unphilosophical sugar manufacturer who committed suicide over a loss of a few millions following an imprudent purchase of beets. Before swallowing his cyanide he ate a dish of braised beef, of which he was very fond, and which evidently represented, for him, the finest aspect of existence. But who would now commit suicide over a bankruptcy of five billion, involving the exhaustion of the oil-wells of an entire hemisphere?

One of the arguments developed by the anti-Sidoines of America, Germanic in name for the most part, was that it would be necessary to renounce death by electrocution, to which the American people are very attached. Every people has its genre of execution, which it deems superior to that of its neighbor. We find in the guillotine, although it is disgusting and barbaric, the same charm that the Spaniard finds in the garrote, the Englishman in hanging and the Yankee in the electric chair. The truth is that the Napus, which is ideally proper and prompt, is a form of death far superior to these ridiculous procedures; unfortunately, it is uncontrollable and defies the skill of the executioner.

It cannot be said that the news of an imminent rupture of relations between France and Germany on the question of aphanasia had an enormous impact on the nation. For one thing, general sensibility and sentimentality, which are the sources of apprehension, had been considerably weakened by the napusian epidemic. Secondly, the rhythm of Franco-German wars, at an average rate of two per century, had reduced that scourge—the one about which human complain more than any other in words, but accept willingly in fact—to banality. Finally, scientific training, to which we owe the curious institution of Polyplasts, resulted in a sort of fatality: “It’s the way it is because that’s the way it is.”

In the nineteenth century, a short lieutenant from Brienne, Napoléon Bonaparte, who had a flat wisp of hair over his forehead, excited general enthusiasm by declaring war on all and sundry, and fascinated the French by enabling them to commit massacres for fifteen years without any kind of valid reason. He came after another wretch with the head of a cat, by the name of Robespierre, who had thousands of heads cut off in order to inaugurate the reign of fraternity. These examples show that hecatombs are easily admitted by nations when the person who orders them has a certain dose of sympathy and enthusiasm, as in a game of chance or angling.

In the laboratories of the Aristotle Foundation we had a few Germans who had come to study our methods, while we were supposed to be studying theirs. The truth is that we each kept to our own; these things are not transmissible. When they discovered what was going on these Germans said: “Damn it! We’ve going to have to go back to the old routine.” No other reflection. Personally, I wasn’t sorry to see them go, given that one of them, who was blond and remarkably neat, with a profile as regular as a cameo, was rather attached to my lovely Henriette.

The employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris ensured that in the course of the hundred hours, twelve thousand five hundred communications were exchanged, by wireless and other means, between the various peoples of the planet, constituting a yellow book of twenty tomes, in which all the questions raised by the Napus and the Sidoine law were treated simultaneously.

The British Empire was in the lead, with three thousand three hundred and one communications, maintaining an uncertainty that lasted until the final minute. It is a prodigy that that great nation has, in the course of its history, taken energetic decisions, given the pleasure it takes in not hurrying and “dragging its feet,” as the saying has it. We came next with 2,596, on the same footing as the United States (2,507) and Germany (2,610). Italy only had 1,040.

The smallest figure was Spain’s, with only seventeen communications. That nation, although struck by the Napus in relatively imposing proportions, seemed to have retired from European life, either because it had succeeded in retreating into its shell like a snail or because it had delegated its historical energy to its descendants in South America. Its example proves that it is not sufficient for a great and beautiful race, as original as the race possessed of the gilded language of Saint Theresa, Cervantes, de Rojas, Calderon, Balmès and Santiago Rusiñol, to produce mystics, writers and painters. It is also necessary to produce military leaders, in the shelter of which the arts, sciences and mores prosper. Although every conqueror is a scourge, there is no greater benefit than a sage and powerful military gift associated with that of a statesman. One such had arrived in Spain in 1924, with a certain General Primo de Rivera.13

Around the sixtieth hour, there was a moment of hope that an eventual agreement might be reached. That hope came from a transcription error in a German dispatch to the English government, which said that no fundamental concession was possible, and which was understood as saying exactly the opposite. For half an hour, until the mistake had been officially established, it was thought that the Boche were retracting their claws.

La Renaudière and the King did not take any rest during the hundred hours, while packets of telegrams were brought to them in baskets. At the Foundation, we organized a rota that permitted us to communicate with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at any hour of the day or night. The most impassive person of all was Sidoine, in spite of the death threats that were addressed to him by pacifists from all points of the globe.

Remarkably, during that hundred-hour interval, only thirty cases of the Napus were recorded in Paris and seventy-four in the provinces, although the figures had previously risen to five hundred per day. Was it necessary to conclude therefrom that certain mental or intellectual states were unfavorable to aphanasia?

It has been observed that monks, who constantly exteriorized a preoccupation with death, in the midst of extreme privations and frequent mortifications, live for a long time. It was also observed that the Napus afflicted them less cruelly than other social categories, although some of them went as far as imploring it as a celestial grace. It appeared, after extensive research, that the death of an inventor before he had realized his most important invention, especially if the invention in question involved some significant advantage or benefit for humankind. Even with regard to literature, the interruption of a masterpiece by death was rare.

About the seventy-second hour, without anyone being able to figure out why, the conviction was acquired by the public that the new war, dubbed the Napus War, could not happen, by reason of its probable atrocity. People accosted one another, crying: “I swear to you that it’s impossible! How can you expect the Germans, or us, to expose themselves to seeing cities like Paris, Berlin, Lyon, Munich, Marseilles, Dresden etc. to collapse beneath bombardments, perpendicular or parabolic?” Those who spoke in this fashion were often the same ones who had declared a few hours earlier that war was inevitable.

We Polyplasts, more complex in our reasoning by virtue of our mixed blood, objected in vain that in no era had atrocity ever acted as a brake on war. In the wake of our arguments, all weak minds, and a certain proportion of strong but stubborn ones, took up the humanitarian refrain again.

Now, the intensity of killing is not always proportional to the improvement or the horror of the means of killing. The said means being refined, demand extensive knowledge and special conditions; the former are subject to weaknesses, the latter are not always realized. That explains why, in scientifically-organized carnage, more combatants are always spared than one would expect. The battles claimed to be the most murderous of all, even ahead of those of antiquity, are, according to explorers, those of gorillas armed with ironwood clubs.14

At the landmark of the ninetieth hour, a petition appeared in the press of the entire world signed by several thousand intellectuals, protesting against the possibility of a war unleashed for a scientific motive over the question of the Napus. On the pretext of averting a certain form of death, the fields of Europe and elsewhere were about to be strewn with cadavers.

The authors of the petition appeared to be under the illusion that absurdity has ever stopped crowds on the brink of stupidity or communal crime. On the contrary, it is evident that the absurd exercises an attraction on human gatherings, as the abyss exercises one on individuals. Where is the resolute alpinist who has not had to struggle, at a bend in a mountain path, against vertiginous magnetism, the call of the gulf? That sentiment, entirely physical, is reproduced in the mental domain. There is nothing more fragile than common sense in the presence of the brutal reactions of instinct. With regard to the impulsion and appetite of insanity, human beings are equipped with few and fragile brakes.

The further the time advanced, dilated and stretched by apprehension, like an elastic band, the more accustomed the public became to the idea of a new conflagration and came to consider it as an unavoidable fatality, just as they had with the Napus. Human beings, in certain respects, are designed to accept calamities. They begin by resisting, for form’s sake, after the fashion of children; gradually, however, the screams die down, the gestures of revolt become more widely spaced and diminished in amplitude. In the face of the tempests that assail them in the course of their brief sojourn in this world, they always seem, to some extent, to be in the process of drowning.

Between the ninetieth and the ninety-fifth hours a phenomenon was produced that had been observed before, but much attenuated, in the run-up to previous wars: a multitude of inventors of technical methods, homicidal or antihomicidal, battered at the doors of the Ministry or the Aristotle Foundation.

The majority of these ingenious devices relied on the very electrical and wave-based technologies banned by the Sidoine law. Others were founded on the employment of a new power-source, extracted from gravity, the sun or the gravity of Jupiter—a power-source that was undeniable, and even industrially employed, but difficult to manipulate in the midst of the tumult of battle.

The employment of “moles,” or depositors of subterranean explosives, broadly perfected, apparently ought to play an important role in sieges.

Apparatus productive of intolerable and shattering sounds, capable of causing death at a range of a hundred kilometers, were also greatly commended. Experiments were carried out with instruments of appropriate measure on a small scale using minuscule models, but in which the intensity of the sound was already as dolorous as possible. Rats, guinea-pigs, young dogs and cats could not resist them, and collapsed, agonized, paws in the air, as soon as the strident throbbing machines were switched on. By virtue of a ludicrous exception, snakes did not seem to be inconvenienced; they are animals of a different kind, having original means of communication among themselves and possessing a science that we do not have. It has been claimed that they had been subject to the Napus for a long time—about a century before us—but that is an opinion that has not so far been verified.

Now, of the approximately one thousand inventors of the ninetieth hour, seven hundred and fifty—a considerable number—were to be napusified in the following three months—with the consequence that Henriette, 14,026 and I wondered whether imaginative fertility might not be a premonitory symptom of aphanasia. Have I mentioned that, in the same period, twenty cases of cyclic madness, reputedly incurable, were suddenly cured, without the death without remains seeming to have afflicted the insane more severely than the non-insane?

Remarkably, that recovery from serious mental illness, evidently linked to the mysterious Disease, and which constituted its beneficial aspect, worked in the following fashion: a return not to reason but to the childishness and babbling of the third year, to the zigzags and tremors of nascent thought and to the irreducible obstinacy and impulses of young minds; then, in a phase averaging ten days, a mental replenishment equivalent to the period between the third and twelfth year, a fondness for games and sports and a certain frivolity persisting until the complete return to normality, and even afterwards. It was a recommencement of existence following the sly and rhythmic destruction of the individual struck by madness.

After the ninety-fifth hour, which fell at six o’clock in the evening, while, throughout the extent of the nation’s territory, there was already a general mobilization for war under way, crowds began to form in squares and at crossroads, as at the approach of a tragic event. Luminous signs projected in the sky announced, minute by minute, the failure of means of conciliation, the failure of the Chinese intervention, on which people had counted momentarily, the failure of the Australian peace proposals founded on the possibility of an amendment of the Sidoine law—and then, successively, Germano-Austrian mobilization, Russian mobilization, Italian mobilization, Belgian mobilization, Serbian mobilization, Polish mobilization, Rumanian mobilization, Bulgarian, Swedish and Dutch mobilization. England still had not rallied to the call, but the “home fleet” commanded by Admiral Turnship, of the Superior Council of the Admiralty, had returned to its bases and was checking its hypermagnetos.

One would have said that things were moving full steam ahead in the days of coal—a strange phase in human history, that of black bread, when people lived underground like burrowing animals, hammering seams in cadence and bringing down the dark produce of the miserly earth amid shiny or dusty fissures.

What would the initial German strategy be? Would Friedrich-Wilhelm XIII’s armies invade Belgium or Switzerland, as in the ancient Franco-German wars, or would they proceed with aerial bombardments of Brussels, Antwerp, Paris, London, Milan and Rome, as in the more recent ones, or with expansions of gas transported by artificial winds, as in the one at the beginning of the twenty-second century, or with electrical thunderbolts? Had they developed a new method of causing irresistible floods and artificial earthquakes, as was rumored? Would they unleash, in the direction of neutral countries, hundreds of wild animals and snakes previously infected with rabies?

Such were the questions that idlers asked one another—for it is remarkable that, in matters of foreign war, as in matters of civil war, the rumors of the last become, with a few variations, the realities of the next. In this domain, there is never any amelioration; things always get worse.

To these macabre anticipations we replied, when questioned, that for our part, we had not been wasting our time in matters of National Defense and that we had at our disposal entirely unprecedented means of annihilating the enemy, extracted from the attentive observation of death without remains.

The truth is that our perplexity was great. Was it necessary to maintain the Sidoine law, so recently voted, at the risk of allowing the enemy the terrible privilege of electro-ondic Archimedism? Was it necessary to renounce that law, as soon as hostilities were opened, when its maintenance was the very pretext invoked by the Boches to start the war?

Sidoine, whose strength of persuasion was immense, affirmed that, without a doubt, the multiplication of the Napus in the German army would rapidly compensate for our losses in consequence of the antielectric law. A redoubtable question mark loomed up, however: what if that multiplication did not occur? What if Professor Sidoine was mistaken? If it is true that in the moment of peril, nothing is graver than the alternative, with its troubling calculations, that one, it must be admitted, was massive!

Just as the ninety-seventh hour elapsed, Mouillemouillard handed me the card of a well-known German physicist, chemist and engineer by the name of Kaninchen, who was, for the year 2227, what Edison had been three centuries before: a father of all invention.

I found myself in the presence of a short bespectacled gentleman, like a gnome in tales of the Rhineland, who began by asking me whether anyone could hear us.

After my reassuring response, he declared, in a musical and well-tempered voice more like that of a Hungarian than a Boche, which I can still hear: “I have discovered, mein lieber Herr, not only the secret of the Napus but also the means of providing an admirable system of protection, which consists of always having about one’s person this little tupe.15 I am a humanitarian and a pacifist, mein Herr. It is in consequence of my discovery, officially and secretly tested, that the German government has resolved to embark once again, against you, Europe and America, on general and common destruction.

“The Murmelthier affair is merely a vast cover, and you can imagine, being intelligent, that no one in our country believes it. So, in order that the destruction should not be unilateral, at least with regard to the Napus—there are more than enough other kinds of death—I want you, the French, also to profit from my discovery. Each race requires a particular dosage of the substance, the formula of which, with its ethnic variations, remains my secret and my property. This tupe is only effective on French blood; it only immunizes French blood. I warn you that it would be futile to communicate it to an Englishman. An Italian or a Belgian; it would not provide any protection whatsoever. Every type is dosed for the protection of ten thousand human beings.”

Kaninchen’s physiognomy was too well-known for me to be in any doubt as to the identity of my interlocutor. I was preparing to stammer my thanks when the fatal click was heard and the Boche philanthropist and inventor of an infallible protection against the Napus disappeared, like so many others before him. All that remained was the illusory little tube, which stayed there, within range of my hand, clenched with laughter—for I was laughing wholeheartedly, for half a dozen interconnected motives, as happens to us Polyplasts.

I was laughing at the Boche’s galliphilic crisis, doubtless resulting, in his mind, from the identity of contradictions that is one of the pillars of insanity and German metaphysics, the one tending to the other. I was laughing at his naïve confidence in the efficacy of the substance in the little “tupe.” I was laughing in anticipation of the laughter at the Aristotle when I told them the story. I was laughing at the incredulity that it would encounter among those who, in spite of everything, remained admirers of Germany—for germanomania is a disease, of a different kind from the Napus, but a disease nevertheless. I was not laughing at the further grievance that Kanichen’s death without remains would constitute, if it ever came out that it had taken place in my laboratory, at the ninety-seventh hour of the ultimatum.

What should I do? Should I recommend silence to that imbecile Mouillemouillard, imposing upon him a suggestion stronger than that of any examining magistrate or Boche who might interrogate him about Kaninchen’s disappearance? Should I keep quiet, wait, and, as they say, let things take their course? Should I consult Sidoine, or Ailette or Eustache, or my dear Henriette, or 14,026?

I detest perplexity, which does not suit my temperament and makes me feel physically ill. I considered, on the corner of my desk, the little tube that Kaninchen had left me, on dematerializing and vanishing into the ether. The tiny bottle was full of a pink liquid and sealed by a yellow-tinted ground-glass stopper.

Mouillemouillad came in without knocking. He was livid, overwhelmed by the idea of the new war, like a white wax candle meting in front of a fire. Von Tschuppe’s interrogation had left him with a prodigious respect, a kind of veneration, for the Boche.

Wide-eyed, he asked: “What’s happened to Monsieur Kaninchen?”

Laughing, I replied to him, in the manner of the little girl of yore: “Kanichen a pati. N’a pus!”

“Oh my God!” cried Chignol’s brother. “What’s going to happen to us? What will Monsieur Tschuppe say?”

At that moment, he spotted the tube left by Kaninchen and, with the curiosity of a laboratory technician, before I could stop him, he took out the stopper. This time there was a hissing noise, accompanied by a sudden evaporation of part of the pink liquid, which transported my faithful Mouillemoulliard, to the shoreless land of Catch-me-if-you-can.

Undoubtedly, Kaninchen had discovered a means of artificially provoking the Napus, and he had come, an ambassador of aphanasia, to get rid of the redoubtable masters of the Aristotle Foundation, on behalf of Germany, at the moment of the war’s inception. But Providence had determined that either his own product or the spontaneous Napus—the classic Napus—had carried him away before he accomplished his criminal design.

Every cloud has a silver lining: the worthy Mouillemouillard’s dispersal dissipated the risk of an indiscretion.

I was savoring that egotistical observation when my delightful Henriette came in, as calm as if the scourge of an inexplicable war were not suspended by a three-hour thread above our heads.

“I’m looking for Mouillemouillard,” she said.

“You won’t find him. He’s just been napusified.”

“Oh, the poor fellow! Why, what’s this little open tube?”

“Don’t touch that!”

I told her the story of the two dramas I had jut witnessed. She confessed to me, in her turn, that they did not intimidate her much, for she was on the track of the fifth magnetic center in the cell, which would doubtless ensure the dynamic equilibrium of tissues.

My preoccupation was quite different. I was wondering how to get rid of Kaninchen’s homicidal gift without running the risk of aphanasia. I got an idea. In the laboratory next door 14,026 had a sturdy dog, patched up with thread, that had been used in experiments in vivisection six months before. I went to fetch it, brought it back on a lead and showed it the fatal tube.

“Fetch!”

It looked at me sadly, with an almost human expression of reproach, and meekly approached the object. Scarcely had it sniffed it than it disappeared with a hiss more prolonged that Mouillemouillard’s.

“Damn!” said Henriette. “That’s conclusive! We mustn’t get any closer to that product of Boche malice. But one very serious question arises, my dear Poly 17,177.”

“What?”

“Had Kaninchen already delivered his secret to the German General Staff? If he had, induced Napus will become the most terrible weapon of the new war. Shouldn’t we at least inform Sidoine and La Renaudière?”

I did not share that opinion. There was a good chance that Kaninchen, who was professionally very discreet, had kept his discovery to himself. I decided to content myself with locking my laboratory and abandoning it, on some pretext or other, until the end of hostilities.

“But how do you know that the residue of the mysterious product in the tube won’t pass through the walls, like an omega-ray, and napusify all the professors and Polyplasts of the Aristotle Foundation?”

The fear was justified. The pink substance must be terribly active, since it had aphanased the dog, a member of a species previously immune. I decided to tell Sidoine about the strange succession of complications. He was in mysterious conversation with an officer from the general staff, to whom he was handing sheets of paper covered with figures and diagrams. When the meeting had finished I told him my story briefly.

The decision was rapidly taken.

“There’s no doubt that it’s a question of an attack on the Foundation. Of all the Boche masked by science, none is more redoubtable than Kaninchen, and his aphanasia is a blessing. We’re going to move our laboratory and our archives within the next four hours, on the pretext that they’re not safe from bombardments, and we’ll retreat to Underground 7, where vast facilities, well-equipped for research, were set up eighteen months ago.”

That was done. The abandoned Aristotle Foundation would soon become a center of intensive aphanasia for its surroundings, without anyone except Sidoine, Henriette and myself knowing the reason for that intensification of the epidemic. At the time of writing, however, the virulence of the Kaninchen tube seems to have almost completely disappeared.

From the ninety-ninth hour onwards, the population of Paris, understanding that no conciliation was possible between such opposed viewpoints, waited with mingled curiosity and dread for the first Boche devilment. The general staff of the air force had disposed defensive wave-transmitters around our great cities, especially Marseilles, Lyon and Paris, in spite of the Sidoine law—and rumor of that, like millions of swarms of bees, was already creating an atmosphere of alarm. We knew immediately that it was the same in Germany, where Berlin, Dresden and Munich were protected by other, equally effective waves of a similar kind.

That ensured that the two antagonistic nations avoided launching their bomber fleets against one another. By contrast, London having continued to remain in suspense, by virtue of the lack of decision that doubtless resulted from unlimited participation in sports, the Lufthansa of the twenty-third century sent a thousand aircraft against the capital of the United Kingdom, which demolished, in advance of any declaration of war, the entire district of Whitechapel, along with Piccadilly and St. James’s, which they had targeted. That casual action seemed hardly tolerable to the liberal English government that immediately replaced the conservative cabinet. By way of reprisal, Admiral Turnship launched a hundred hydroplanes that he happened to have in readiness against Berlin, and hollowed out a hole in Potsdam park a hundred meters in diameter and fifty deep.

Thus hostilities commenced, in a manner entirely different from what had been imagined—for there is no example on record of any conflagration, especially a European or German conflagration, beginning in the manner envisaged by the general staff on either side. When one expects a war of battle-lines, there is a war of rapid skirmishes, and vice versa. When one assumes that tanks, aircraft, anti-aircraft weapons, or poison gases will play a preponderant role, it is the converse that happens.

We still laugh when we remember the errors of our French and German forefathers drenching one another with microbial cultures supposed to be the causes of epidemics—in conformity with contemporary legend—which might as well have been cats’-piss. But so powerful is the dogmatization of a scientific hypothesis, and so durable is its tenacity, that it takes time to perceive such things. Then there was talk of the methodical disorganization of cyton, which, being non-existent, was not in danger of being disorganized. But how can one count all the mirages with which so-called civilized humans sometimes imagined that they might cure and protect themselves, and sometimes to attack and massacre one another?

When, at the hundredth hour, no snare became evident—no artificial tidal-wave, no chemico-electrical storm or earthquake, no fulgurant ray, launched by Germany against Belgium or France, there was an atrocious anguish for all the French, as for all the Belgians. Everyone envied the lot of the English, who at least knew what they were dealing with, and, without having wanted to, had entered into battle first.

Henriette, Sidoine and I, the unleashers of Kaninchen’s secret, began to reassure ourselves, telling one another that the secret in question had not yet been communicated by the scientist to the Boche High Command and that the maleficent tube was a unique exemplar. Nevertheless, Sidoine was distressed to see his law violated and electro-magnetism employed, as before, with waves, for the propagation of news and the extermination of the human race.

Before shutting ourselves away, for an indefinite time, in Underground 7 and organizing there the intensive Archimedism that decides victory in modern warfare, Henriette and I wanted to take account of the ravages caused by the Napus. It was at Père-Lachaise alone, in the new buildings erected for that purpose, that rows of numbered plaques mentioned, with the names and forenames of the deceased, the place and date of their disappearance: an anthropometric service of a new kind, testifying to the intensity of the most singular and most inexplicable plague of all time.

In Paris, the disease had claimed its eleven thousand five hundred and ninety-fourth victim, with the fateful name of Monsieur Meureblanc, who had disappeared the previous day at the corner of the Rue Saint-Lazare and the Place de Rome, almost opposite the premises of Action Française. The curve of the Disease, increasing incessantly since the beginning, indicated a marked fall in the hours preceding the mobilization, but now we were in full ascensional recrudescence.

The old warden, approaching us with a distressed expression remarked, with a sigh: “You can see, Messieurs et Mesdames, that everything is happening at the same time, the war and this. What will become of us.”

What would become of us? My God, that which has become of all human beings since the immeasurable depths of time; that which ordinary, traditional graves indicate to us, whether fresh and covered with a new or nearly-new marble slab, or sunk into the ground and half-disappeared, with their dislocated grilles, or completely covered with stray creepers, nettles and dodder, like images of oblivion.

Never again would the brevity of life, its vicissitudes, its chagrins and its dreams appear to us in such sharp relief, with such a sharp autumnal etching. Never again, either, would that symbiosis of the vegetal and the human, which had become one of the great chapters of human knowledge, after century upon century of darkness, be offered to us with similar clarity and all its horizons. How had it been so long ignored or forgotten, in spite of dryads and Mediterranean or Celtic legends that depict souls captured by vegetation, imprisoned in the hollows of willows, oaks and olive-trees? Innumerable were the sepulchers of hard stone, corroded by the wind, the rain and incessant friction, that had been burst open by the vigorous growth of a seed, at the expense of one or more cadavers, the thrust of an acacia, an elm, an ask, an oak or a linden, and which seemed to have passed on to the tree the substance and the relic of a corpse, or several corpses of vanished human beings.

Here, planted upon an invisible but detectable skeleton, was the wood and the bark of a single jet, translating, or transmuting, in its vegetal impetuosity, that which the speaking being had never been able to yield or produce, mounting toward the heavens with a proud security. Further away, the heavens’ response already appeared, with a collapse duplicating that of an apoplexy, or a pulmonary congestion, or a embolism, at twenty-two, or thirty, or fifty, or sixty: the fire of clouds after that of blood. There, before our bewildered gaze, three trunks, green at the base, rusty black higher up, climbed in parallel, and then in a kind of spiral, in the manner of an amorous searching for a perfect embrace, without finding it. One inferred that there were three cadavers there, of various epochs, a perhaps a father, mother and child, henceforth vegtalized, united in that other form of being, and a family, as they had been in the preceding one. With what heart we wished them bon voyage, for that new duration of one or two centuries, unless the caprice of a pruner of woodcutter of celestial fluid cut them down.

How evident, among all these symbioticized beings, seemed the sap departed from the opening of the portal vein, or the severed carotid, or even the sclerotized and broken heart, burst forth and remounting from there to the branches, via the sinuosities of the roots, then the verticality of the trunk or trunks. That the sap in question continued the blood or lymph there could be no doubt. That the foliage was itself merely a reprise, greatly increased and multiplied by the new respiratory function of the pulmonary foliage, nothing was more palpable.

One could even ask oneself, on departing from those immediate observations, whether veritable forests might not spring from immense ranks of sepulchers, or ancient battlefields; whether, where the vegetal abounds, the humus might have been fertilized by the cadaver before springing into arborescence.

At least, that view did not seem so absurd to my dear Henriette and myself, moved by the thought of those mute metamorphoses, in the midst of which we were walking. The sky, fresh and gilded, was not at all dramatic. Before serving for carnage, before the doors of iron and steel, the science that we loved opened its silver door there upon clear horizons, which overlook the poetry of logicians.

Doubtless the imminence of the inexpiable hostilities that were about to surge forth, combined with the new and constant threat of the Napus, excited our imagination at the same time as our faculty of reason. What laboratory, however provided by the imagination with apparatus of every sort, could match that vast, calm cemetery, where biologists, anatomists, historians, archeologists, philosophers, botanists and entomologists could, with a little attention and some liberation from current prejudices, work back to the discreet or secret exchanges of life! The chain is there, before our eyes, with its links scarcely separated; and it is laudable for us to reconstitute, at least for an important part of its journey: that which goes from decomposition to renewal.

If it is true, though, that only humans have souls, that only Catholic theology is truly inspired, with a mastery that defies the centuries, what is that spirit distinct from the soul, and also from matter, which associates, by narrow and invisible communications, the animal, the human and the vegetal? In vain we reconstitute in our retorts, cleverer and more sagacious than those of two or three hundred years ago, the substances that are found in living organisms. Those syntheses and syntheses of syntheses, far-reaching as we suppose them to be and grouped in such seductive theories that they give the illusion of truth, are merely a caricature of the animation of their molecules by life. Never is one further away, in our finest methods of research, from the solution of the vital problem than when one believes that one is close to it. There is a mysterious power therein, even more subtle than the Napus, which causes the barely-glimpsed mirage to fade away and vanish.

Until aphanasia, death appeared to be the material dissociation and return to the mould of substances aggregated, fused and hierarchically edified in organs. With aphanasia came the intervention of the unprecedented notion and abrupt passage of components to nothingness, with no intermediary. That was to be, with its recoil, the origin of a new metaphysical system, intermediary between miracle and current fact, which is only distinguished from miracle by the fact that our minds and eyes became used to it. For where is the fact of importance that, in its origin and unfathomable depths, is not miraculous? History, however logical, is merely a tissue of the miraculous that has escaped to the fatal and the expected.

While discussing that, Henriette and I made our way into an elevated sector of the cemetery, as rich in undergrowth, bushes and small trees as a displacement of the forest of Fontainebleau. We followed a path along the side of a hill, bordered by broken and slanting stones, cracked and collapsed marbles and grilles corroded by rust, from which new ash-trees, oaks and elms were launching forth. The bitter file of nocturnal specters that haunt the Parisian necropolis had become Birnam Wood. How many old relatives were there, as in the death of Breton legend, converted into receptacles for chattering, mocking and frivolous birds, re-linked nevertheless to the great and noble mystery of transubstantiation, taking account of it and celebrating it in their songs.

Everyone says and pretends that the nightingale and the blackbird sing for love, and improvise in its honor the symphonic orchestrations that left Henriette and myself breathless, but they certainly do not sing for love. In a different fashion from us, in accordance with a form of knowledge that escapes us, they too are taking account of the vegetalization of the disjointed remains of dead humankind—in a word, symbiosis. They are informing and warning one anther; they would like, being sociable and moderate propagandists, to inform us of it. Who can doubt that there is, in birds, a naturist apostolate of the perpetual transformations of these pockets of fire, water and molds that are living beings, if he has listened to the whistlers and trillers responding to one another, from branch to branch, by vibration and stridulation of a droplet of water in their tiny throats?

From another viewpoint, the cemetery, in the civic and incalculable form of Père-Lachaise, is like a projection of memory. It reproduces its abrupt failures, the collapses, the absences and also the disguises and metamorphoses. We members of the Aristotle Foundation, especially Polyplasts, for whom invention and discovery are everyday affairs, sense its affinities with memory with a particular vivacity. Many a time, seeking a link of cause and effect beneath the ferns and creepers of intuition, as others seek for a word or a date, do we not see that link flee us and disappear with a kind of psychological mischief? Try, then, to decipher, in spite of the encrusted moss and the corrosion of time, the name and date on that slab. The wear and tear is of the same kind, with regard to the past, that of a verbal root or a corpse. Dictionaries are cemeteries, in which few inscriptions remain legible, or even discernible. Here and there, someone erases the signs, and the signs of the signs, only allowing the brief play of light and shadow to subsist, on tombs or in the mnemonic realm.

All of a sudden, the cold gripped my delicate beautiful friend and myself, more coarsely-woven: the cold of the season, of the hour, of all those dead people, of the bellicose circumstances that advertised, once again, such depopulations; the cold of infinite space and of ignorance, around the poor fire of our hazardous suppositions. Death without remains could have surprised us, at that moment, and we would have accepted it in the name of symbiosis, in the name of the birds of the cemetery, and also in the name of that Providence to which it is necessary to come back when one has made, even and especially Polyplastically, the tour of everything.

For, according to what I have just explained, the fact that Our Lord, Jesus Christ, the only possible explanation of the Universe, died on the wood of a cross, called a “particular tree,” takes on a precise significance. Among the abysms of light that circumvent the mystery of the Passion and the connected mystery of the Incarnation, there shines a more blinding certainty. We both reflected upon it as we descended the sinuous slopes toward the threatened city.

13. Miguel Primo de Rivera, Marquis of Estella, was the Prime Minister of Spain from 1923-30, having seized power in a coup.

14. The said explorers were, of course, lying.

15. I have reproduced this word as printed in the French text. It is obviously a deliberate misrendering of “tube,” but Kaninchen’s speech—unlike Murmelthier’s, although I have rendered it into ordinary English—is not generally marked in Daudet’s text by any kind of eye-dialect supposedly representative of Teutonic pronunciation, so its employment stands out as an oddity.