I left Dr. Evrard and returned to the Chaussée-d’Antin as midnight was chiming. I was exhausted by fatigue, so I did not take long to go to sleep as I mentally reviewed all that my old friend had told me, revisiting in dreams the epochs that he had evoked.
The next morning, my head a trifle heavy, I tried to get down to work.
Sometimes, when one is sitting at one’s desk and one takes up the pen, Phoebus is deaf and Pegasus mulish, as Boileau puts it. In other, less poetic and less classical terms, some days, in spite of the perseverance one puts into it, one cannot find the opening words of the idea one wants to express. Those first words resemble the end of a confused and tangled thread that one wants to unravel. Once the end of the thread is discovered and seized, everything will wrong and the Gordian knots of the tangle will come undone easily—but the difficulty is getting a grip on it.
The physiologists, who are not always as fortunate in their explanations, suggest that the reason for that contest between the will and the idea is a lack of equilibrium between the imagination and the body. The former desires but the latter, which is not enslaved to it, jibs; “the husband orders, the wife resists,” as Balzac says. It is necessary, therefore, to bring them into accord, to the same rhythm.
The best thing to do, in that circumstance, is to leave the desk, the pen, the ink and the paper and to devoted oneself to a completely different occupation. Some writers, including Casimir Delavigne, take their hat and go for a walk; others—Balzac, for example—wear out the soles of their slippers of the parquet of their study. Ampère played with his wig; Ludovic Halévy, that golden heart, taking generosity to the extent of weakness, sought to pick a German quarrel with those around him, especially his two sisters, in which he was not long delayed in being the first to laugh, as soon as he sensed enough movement in his nerves to write his beautiful pages of music. Walter Scott took up a hammer and nails and set the hands that had written The Antiquary and Ivanhoe to rearranging the trophies that ornamented his study.
As for me, if I dare to place my name humbly in the wake of so many illustrious ones, I have recourse to the example of the Scottish romancer; when I cannot find the diabolical end of the thread that I mentioned just now. I take off my jacket, I rearrange my books, I modify the disposition of my collections, and I tidy or untidy the cupboards that contain them.
Now, that is precisely what happened to me on the day after my visit to Dr. Evrard. With my head still full of all that he had told and read to me, I could not contrive to write those crucial first lines that I have just been talking about.
After having scribbled and torn up a dozen pages, therefore, I brought a ladder, climbed up on to the top step and started exploring and charging the position of some bottles, which, forgotten and covered in dust, had been placidly sat on top of a large Flemish dresser for years.
While I looked at those glass vessels and picked them up, trying to decipher the dusty and partly-effaced characters of their labels, the ineptly-closed door of my study came open, my little dog Flock starting barked with all his might and Mademoiselle Mine, my charming quadrumane from Madagascar, leapt on to my shoulder with a single bound. That sudden noise and the unexpected shock caused me to drop the bottle that I was holding. It fell to the floor, smashed, and a strong smell of sulfuric ether expanded to fill the room.
Immediately, a kind of vertigo took possession of me, and I only just had time to climb down the ladder and open the two windows precipitately, for the sake of the causes of the accident; my little dog, Master Flock, was already panting, and Mademoiselle Mine’s large golden eyes were beginning to take to on an expression of languor, while her little hands, ordinarily so agile and nervous, were falling inert upon the thick fur of her flanks.
As you know, ether, which has such powerful anesthetic properties, evaporates quickly. Soon, however—at least, I thought so—thanks to a vigorous current of air established between the doors and the windows, no other traces of the accident remained but a large damp stain on the carpet. I picked up the glass debris scattered here and there, and reclosed the windows, while Mademoiselle Mine engaged Flock in an animated game of tag. As the emotions provoked by the accident, by strongly exciting my nerves, had doubtless restored my mental and physical equilibrium sufficiently for me to work, I sat down at my desk again, and, supporting my forehead in my left hand, I took up my pen in the right and dipped it in the ink.
I sensed that inspiration had finally deigned to arrive, and I was about to write the first words of my piece when majestic songs became audible outside and captured the attention of my ears. Voices of a character previously unknown to me, of a immense power and a sweetness that seemed prodigious, combined with a melodious accompaniment of brass instruments similar, so far as I could judge, to those that my friend Sax has invented.88
The voices were singing distinctly, without a syllable being lost, the words of the Gospel that the church has introduced into the All Saints’ Day mass: Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis et orenati estis; et ego reficiam vos. Amen. Come to me, you who labor and are burdened, and I will comfort you. Praise God.
Then, suddenly, that song of hope was succeeded by a funereal song: Absolve, Domine, animas omnium fidelim defunctorum ab omni vinculo delictorum. Lord, deign to absolve the souls of the dead and deliver them from the bonds of their sins.
“What does all this mean?” I wondered.
Suddenly, my door opened and a person I did not know came in, who sat down unceremoniously in an armchair near the fireplace.
Now, without my being able to explain it, that fireplace was no longer in the location it had previously occupied against the wall; it was in the middle of the room and had become a sort of item of furniture of extreme elegance, which was burning a gas of extreme purity.
I said that I did not know the person who had come into my study abruptly and was nonchalantly warming her feet, and yet it seemed to me that a close amity linked me to the young man in question, for I instinctively addressed him as “tu.”
“What do you think, Azrael?” I asked him. “Isn’t that beautiful music?”
“Yes,” he replied, “you’re right. The steam organs on the picturesque thousand-meter tower at the highest point of Montmartre are doing their work very well today. The words of the songs are emerging clearly against the accompaniment, which makes the stand out. But bah! That’s only the infancy of the art.”
“The infancy of the art, you say? Organs that sing, pronouncing words that can be heard distinctly all over Paris!”
Azrael looked at me, smiling. “One might think you were a thousand years behind the times and contemporary with Adolphe Sax, the first man to conceive and formulate the idea of those gigantic instruments. Thank God that his great-grandson continued and perfected his work so singularly. But what were you doing yesterday? I didn’t see you all day. Myself, I went to the Hôtel-Dieu on the heights of Romainville to see an operation on a poor boy in whom I have an interest, and who broke his leg during a hunting-party in Berlin in the morning.”
“He was in Berlin yesterday morning and had an operation in Paris yesterday evening?”
“The atmospheric highway was working poorly again—we took six hours instead of five to cover that short distance. It seems that the condensed carbon dioxide that powers the machine had suffered some evaporation. It’s unpardonable! We manipulate that material easily today, so redoubtable for our ancestors that it killed a considerable number of the first people who attempted to apply it to the needs of locomotion and industry.”
“And how is your invalid?”
“Everything went well. With the aid of the electricity that burns and cuts at the same time, the wound was opened, the splinters of broken bone removed and the periosteum—the delicate membrane enveloping the bones, which reproduces and regenerates them—conserved. It will take the patient a month at the most, to regain complete possession of his broken leg. Anyway, being ill is an inviting prospect, in order to stay in the new Hôtel-Dieu, two minutes from the center of Paris by aerial highway, with eight hundred private rooms. Every patient there is isolated, unable to hear the groans of his companions in distress, with no fear of the deadly miasmas of epidemic diseases, cared for by a Sister of Charity and visited eight or ten times a day by eminent surgeons.”
“The operation must have been long and painful.”
“What are you saying? Don’t you know that chloroform, which can be obtained with irreproachable purity, has caused suffering to disappear from the surface of the globe? They boy I’m talking about had scarcely received his wound when I chloroformized him. I maintained him under anesthesia throughout the journey and only allowed him to wake up after the operation had been successfully concluded. At the slightest access of fever the same means will be used, and he will, so to speak, have been injured, operated on and healed without being conscious of it. But aren’t you going out? There’s an odor of ether in here that’s suffocating.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s go out.”
I summoned my valet and asked him to bring my hat. He brought me a light, elegant and comfortable article that had nothing in common with the frightful stove-pipes with which fashion obliges us to cover our heads. I went to a mirror to see how the coiffure in question suited me; it harmonized perfectly with the clothes I was wearing, which bore no more resemblance to my customary frock-cost and trousers than my headgear did to my silk hat.
“Just a moment!” the young man said. “Before going out I have to send word to Berlin to reassure the injured boy’s friends.”
Azrael sat down at my desk and wrote a few lines on a small apparatus placed beside my writing-pad. Two seconds later, a note appeared on the apparatus in handwriting that was a trifle hasty but whose characters were clear and distinct.
The note said:
Thanks for the good news you’ve given us. We’ll go to dinner with you soon. Be at the Café Carême-Dugléré89 at six precisely. It’s the only one where the healthy traditions of the two creators of French cuisine are still maintained.
Berlin, 1 November 2865. 12.01 p.m.
I confess that I was confused.
“Which way shall we go? What if we go to see the Artillery Museum at Vincennes? I’d like to visit those monuments to a barbarity that has disappeared forever from the globe. How can one imagine nowadays that war ever existed, and that the reasoning of might, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of men, decided the destiny of nations? Thank God that the means of destroying armies, fleets and cities became so infallible that it was necessary to renounce them. The electric machine that blew up the entire city of Kronstadt in 2859, and all its fortifications, instantaneously, was the last and ultimate effort of military science. Since then, permanent peace has reigned in Europe It’s necessary to admit that our ancestors were great barbarians. Come on, let’s go to Vincennes.”
“I’ll ask Jean to bring round a carriage.”
“Why not a fiacre hitched to a horse—if there were still horses? We’ll take a locomobile via the atmospheric highway. We’ll be disembarking at Saint Louis’ old château in ten seconds.”
He opened the door and escorted me into a cabinet that had replaced the stair-head. A machine moving smoothly and almost insensibly took us from the fourth floor to the ground floor.
“And to think that a thousand years ago,” my companion observed, “people preferred living on the first floor, where they lacked air and a view, to the fourth, where one enjoys those precious advantages. It’s true that the architects of that era didn’t understand that one could go up to one’s residence by other means than that of a staircase. I saw one of those primitive machines the other day, at the Musée de Cluny. Can you imagine that one had to climb a hundred narrow and slippery steps, which also formed a kind of spiral rotating about an axis, capable of giving vertigo to the most solid head.
A harmonious bell, which struck a perfect musical chord, informed us that we had reached the ground. We opened a door and found ourselves in the street. Sidewalks garnished with paving stones of various colors, forming exquisite mosaics, bordered a street planted with trees, wider than the widest boulevards of the present day. The causeway no longer consisted of macadam or cobblestones, but of a kind of parquet, whose cleanliness was worthy of a Dutch housewife, on which the foot, far from slipping, posed securely.
My mysterious friend made a gesture, and an elegant vehicle immediately emerged from a garage and moved toward us with lightning rapidity. I stepped back immediately in order not to be crushed, but it came to an abrupt halt fifty centimeters away from me, without any hesitation or the slightest oscillation. Not daring to give evidence of my surprise, I took my place beside me friend on a comfortable and elastic seat, and a young mechanic with an intelligent face placed himself behind us.
“Where can I take you, Messieurs?” he asked.
“To Vincennes,” I replied.
He touched a switch lightly, and we drew away. The vehicle moved so rapidly that I could hardly see the road along which we were traveling. By paying close attention, however, I was able to make out thousands of vehicles similar to ours, speeding in every direction along immense roads bordered by houses reminiscent of palaces.
“Aren’t you afraid of some accident?” I said
“What accident? Are accidents possible? Can’t you see the mastery the mechanics have of their locomobiles? The pedestrians walk on the sidewalks or cross the road with the aid of all these footbridges, which carry them up and across without them having the trouble of walking, by means of a kind of endless ribbon, always moving. One might think that you were seeing all this for the first time.”
“We’ve arrived, Messieurs,” the mechanic put in.
My friend gave him a gold coin and we got down.
I confess that the price of the journey seemed high, but I dared not make that reflection for fear of exposing myself once again to the mockery of the man who had already been so amused by my astonishment. Internally, however, I thought: My God! Has the value of gold been so depreciated that one has to pay twenty francs for a cab-ride lasting a few seconds?
“Let’s go in,” said my friend, linking arms with me.
The Château de Vincennes stood in the middle of an immense park in which exotic plants of every species were growing in the open air, among which, in the midst of a vigorously-growing field of sugar-cane I noticed in passing flowers of the most distant and various provenance, and the hottest climates.
On the bank of a stream Azrael picked a pitcher-plant of the species Nepenthes rafflesiana, discovered in 1828 in Singapore by Stamford Raffles, the urn of which contained exquisitely flavored fresh water. I imitated Azrael, detaching two similar flowers from their stems in order to study at leisure the urn, the male flower and the fruit.
Among these fields, so new to me, animals from all over the world were wandering, in a more-or-less wild natural state, for Vincennes had replaced the Natural History Museum, the Botanical Gardens and the Artillery Museum at the same time. Tigers, lions, panthers and jaguars were no longer pacing sadly back and forth in cages eight or ten feet square, and no longer eating spoiled meat declared unfit for human consumption but judged by scientists to be good enough for animals used to nourishing themselves at liberty on live prey. They were in vast enclosures surrounded by railings, it’s true, but which were so well adapted to their habits that they ended up forgetting their captivity. One therefore encountered them in all their beauty and all their instincts.
As for the fortress itself, which loomed up behind the arbors of the menagerie and the fields of sugar cane, an immense roof of glass covered its completely, like a precious jewel of the architecture of the 13th century, in order to shelter it from the insults of the weather, and also to adapt it to its present purpose.
In fact, Vincennes was no longer either a royal residence, a fortified military station or a state prison, but an immense museum in which all the instruments of the past centuries were collected—instruments that had become useless by virtue of their terrible perfection and fatal infallibility.
When we went into the principal hall, showed around by an old man who seemed to me to be almost a centenarian, I expected to see cannons, rifles and sabers, but I only perceive gigantic electric machines; at first glance they resembled Ruhmkorff coils, and were based on the principle of that apparatus, but modified by the improvements that ten centuries of progress had naturally given them.
“Monsieur,” said the director of the Museum, showing me a coil the size of a house, “this is the last word in the art of war. I operated this machine myself in my youth, for I was one of the last soldiers to fight in Europe. This machine produced, in a single second, twenty-four thousand electrical sparks four hundred meters long and two hundred broad. A single one of those sparks was sufficient to destroy an army and blast a town, as it proved only too well by razing Kronstadt in twenty-two seconds. That siege, which would have seemed utterly fantastic in 1865, ten centuries earlier, was, however, accused of dragging on too long. Indeed, as you know, in America, previously, where the civil war over the separation of the southern states was still going on, two armies had destroyed one another mutually in six seconds. Of the eight hundred thousand combatants present, only eight hundred escaped the electric thunderbolts, thanks to a lightning-conductor invented by the great-grandson of a French scientist of the 19th century, Auguste Bertsch, who left behind a justly-celebrated name.”90
“Azrael and I,” I said to the old man, would like to visit the part of your collection devoted to firearms, the usage of which preceded that of electric weapons.”
“Since those childish machines interest you,” the old man replied, obligingly, “would you care to accompany me to that part of my museum.”
As he said that, he opened a door and introduced us into an immense gallery in which picturesque trophies were disposed, not only of ten-shot rifles similar to our revolvers, but also of cannons of every form and dimensions. I noticed, among others, a bomb a thousand meters in diameter, filled with gun-cotton and other fulminating materials, long since substituted for powder. One seemingly-frail machine could launch that bomb four thousand meters, which burst at an altitude of a kilometer and whose debris was sufficient to ravage an entire city the size of Paris.
“Haven’t you had enough of these barbaric and brutal engines of destruction?” said Azrael. “Let’s leave all these implements of the infancy of the art of killing people behind.”
We took our leave of the director of the Vincennes museum and headed toward an immense hall illuminated by the full force of the midday sun. We found a professor there, still young, who was entertaining is pupils with the marvels of the microscopic world that remained so long invisible to the human eye.
“Would you believe, Messieurs,” he said, “that until the middle of the 20th century, science did not possess either the means of weighing, or even of seeing, the emanations that bodies produce? Yes, the odor of a rose struck the sense of smell, the bitter perfumes of camphor gave people headaches, and mortal miasmas, carried from distant regions by the wind, caused epidemics, but chemistry, to which they had exclusive recourse for analysis, showed nothing and indicated nothing. The arrival of the microscope finally changed all that, bringing an end to so much ignorance and setting people on the path to the truth and demonstration.
“Here, for instance, is a morsel of musk, over which I place this objective, which magnifies the surface of objects forty million times. See what a series of jets of vegetable matter are escaping the camphor! See how they’re dispersing! See how the spikes with which they’re bristling cling on to the nervous papillae in the nose, titillating them energetically and penetrating all the way to the brain, where they determine slight congestions. Although also vegetal, the molecules of these violet flowers are of a completely different nature: supple, covered with a kind of oil, they insinuate themselves and slide into the olfactory apparatus to produce an agreeable sensation there. Well, our ancestors hadn’t the slightest notion of all that!”
Then he showed, magnified twenty-five million times, the infusoria of the air and water, with their eggs, their three or four metamorphoses, and their strange ways of life. After that, he caused the mysterious products of the decomposition of organic bodies to appear, which once brought cholera from India to Europe. He similarly displayed those that produce epidemics of typhoid fever, puerperal fever and erysipelas in hospitals, and s many other maladies that could not be cured, prevented or stopped from spreading in the 19th century. Today, carbolic acid, spread by exhalations in the air whenever those miasmas appear, destroys them in a matter of minutes.”
“All this is undoubtedly not lacking in a certain interest,” Azrael murmured in my ear, “but as no one except a schoolboy of sixteen is unaware of these elementary notions, which I studied in my youth and doubtless you did too, let’s not waste our time and let’s continue our walk.”
A false shame caused me to follow Azrael—much to my regret, I confess, for the professor had just announced to his pupils a series of experiments on the Entomozoaria, the strange worms that once infected meat destined for human nourishment, resistant to cooking in boiling water and poisoning with their living germs those who had recourse without precaution to such deadly aliments.91
We went outside, therefore, and before long we found ourselves on one of the immense sidewalks that bordered the vast boulevards forming the most minor of Parisian streets. In the midst of an innumerable crowd, every step offered women of remarkable beauty to my gaze, who did justice to costumes that were simultaneously elegant and charming in their simplicity. Needless to say, the crinoline and the iron-hooped skirt were not featured at all in their styles.
“Oh, look!” I exclaimed, pointing one of them out to Azrael. “What an adorable creature! What a shame not to be able to keep an image of that beautiful individual as souvenir!”
“In truth,” Azrael replied, “there are moments when you remind me of one of those émigrés of ten centuries ago, of whom it was said that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Are you from the year 1865 rather than 2865? Don’t you have your photographic apparatus in your pocket, as I do?”
So saying, he took a little box of a particular form out of his waistcoat pocket, directed it toward the lovely woman who had excited my admiration and moved one of its levers. Then he moved a second lever and deposited a portrait in a hand, of such finesse and exactitude that only the most charming miniatures of Isabey and Madame Oberlin92 can give any idea of it. Resemblance, delicacy of tone, accuracy of hue, living expression—nothing was lacking.
I was careful not to let my surprise show, and silently placed the improvised painting in my wallet.
“I believe,” Azrael said, sniggering, “that we have resolved the problem that Niépce de Saint-Victor was pursuing in 1864.93 But bah! It’s nothing, after all, but an insignificant plaything. Everyone has one and it only costs forty francs—the price of a good cigar.”
As he finished that sentence he presented his case to me and offered me one of the forty-franc cigars in question, which, I must admit, appeared to me to be very fine. I needed to remind myself, nevertheless, that gold must have lost its value, in order that I should not find puffs of tobacco that cost five francs apiece a trifle dear.
While I abandoned myself to these reflections, I noticed that immense umbrellas were being extended over the streets everywhere, moved by a mechanism that was both ingenious and simple, and that they had been substituted for the light and brightly-colored parasols that had once moderated the sun’s excessively warm rays.
“That’s right!” said Azrael. “I’d forgotten that, three days ago, the meteorologists charged by the State for monitoring the direction of the winds had forecast rain for today at four twenty-two and thirty seconds. I get angry when I think that our ancestors, in their ignorance, left their fields of wheat, their vineyards and even their gardens exposed without defense to the caprices of wind, frost, hail and the fury of the winds. Should they not have had meteorology at their disposal, as we do, to anticipate ill-timed downpours, and electricity, with the aid of which all those sinister phenomena have been mastered and vanquished forever?”
We continued our stroll through Paris, and I cannot describe all the dazzling sights that I experienced at every step. Everything seemed new to me, and I was watching dusk fall with disappointment when suddenly, with lightning rapidity, more quickly than I can say, the entirety of Paris was illuminated.
“What! Why are you trembling?” Azrael asked me. “Aren’t you accustomed to seeing the fifty million gas jets that illuminate Paris light up simultaneously every evening, with the aid of a powerful electrical apparatus? Nothing is simpler, and it goes back to the remotest antiquity—1862 or 1865. A thin platinum wire that terminates at each gas jet conducts an electric spark produced by a Ruhmkorff coil to it. Our ancestors four generations ago went to admire the phenomenon, as they called it, at the Sorbonne, and even in shops selling silk clothing on the boulevards. That, at least, is what it says in the Petites Chroniques de la Science, by a certain S. Henry Berthoud, written a thousand years ago, which I found the other day, by the remotest of chances, in a corner of the Imperial Library.94
Chatting in that fashion, we were heading, as best I could judge toward the Champ de Mars. It did not take me long to hear the sound of waves, and I saw emerging before me mot merely a harbor full of ships, but an immense sea on the horizon. Azrael, without noticing my amazement, signaled to a small launch powered by condensed carbon dioxide to come and pick us up and take us aboard a ship that was getting ready to leave for China.
“My friend,” he said to the captain when we had boarded the vessel, a thousand meters long and proportionately wide, “I have some small business matters to attend to in Paris that prevent me from accompanying you to Peking. I therefore request that you be kind enough o bring me back—alive, of course—eight or ten unicornfish, and a hundred fresh swifts’-nests. I’ve only been able to get ones of mediocre quality in Paris for some time. I intend those I’m requesting of your courtesy for a dinner-party I’m giving for a few friends in a fortnight, and I hope you won’t refuse my invitation to join us that evening.”
“Gladly,” said the captain. “Do you need anything else?”
“I don’t want to abuse your kindness—otherwise I’d ask you to administer a severe reprimand to the negligent sculptor Sang-Po, who hasn’t finished the nephrite jade vases for which I sent him the designs personally more than two months ago.”
“Very good!” said the captain. “Your commissions will be carried out, my dear friend; I’m only waiting for my provision of condensed carbon dioxide to leave. Ah. here it is! Au revoir!”
A container was carried aboard, assuredly not as big as one of the trunks of which Parisian ladies make use to transport dresses and hats when they go to spend a week in the country. We went back down into our small boat and the ship departed with the speed of an arrow.
“May God spare her from shipwrecks and tempests!” I exclaimed.
Azrael emitted a burst of laughter that caused my face to turn red. “Idiot!” she said. “What shipwrecks and what tempests can there be today, with the electric currents that control and deflect the winds and regulate submarine currents? Instead of saying and making me hear such silly things, let’s go back to the harbor and visit the fish-parks established there—in accordance, admittedly, with the very elementary ideas of Coste, a member of the Institut in the year of grace 1865, but to whom belongs, nevertheless, the honor of having conceived and realized the beginnings of pisciculture in France.95
We returned to the shore and Azrael showed me immense parks formed by rocks cleverly arranged in such a fashion as to form vast compartments whose water was continually renewed by the sea without permitting the innumerable fish bred therein to escape.
“Monsieur Carême-Dugléré,” said my friend to a young man with excellent manners who came toward us, “would you kindly do us the honors of these piscicultural basins. We’re expecting friends from Berlin imminently for dinner, who left that capital at noon, and we’ll choose, in the meantime, the fish that you’ll be kind enough to serve us.”
“I’m at your disposal, Messieurs,” replied the young man. This is the lobster-park hollowed out under the rocks—for the animals in question like darkness and isolation. By contrast, the crayfish need air and light, so you’ll see them all in the middle of their compartment, even at the surface of the water, so numerous that their antennae resemble millions of blades of sea-grass. Alongside live the turbots, the conger eels, the soles, the dabs, the rays and a few new species imported from Oceania, which the Chinese have taught us to appreciate and to serve their delicate flesh at our tables. I mean the holothuria, those exquisite echinoderms with which trepang is made, and which people hesitated to eat a century ago because they were said to resemble leeches. Unicornfish, the immense American oysters that measure no less than twenty-five centimeters in circumference, clams, another great species of the Venus family, and oysters of every sort, and finally mussels, pullulate in the other parks you can see further away. As for the artificial grottoes overlooking the bank over there and surrounded on all sides by the sea, they’ve been constructed to acclimate the birds knows as salangana, to which bird’s-nest soup is owed; we harvest an average of a hundred and fifty thousand nests a year, which is barely enough for Parisian consumption.”
“Not to mention that they’re not as high-quality, for a true gourmet, as the choice nests that come from Java and Sumatra,” Azrael interjected, taking a small watch from his pocket.
Not only did that watch indicate hours, minutes and seconds, but it was also a thermometer, a barometer and a compass, although it was only as big as a twenty-franc coin.
“In half an hour our Prussian friends will be arriving, famished,” he went on. “Come on, Monsieur Carême-Dugléré, let’s pay attention to the menu for our dinner.”
“Would the Messieurs like caviar, clam pâté and Chinese shrimp canapés for hors-d’oeuvre?”
“All that’s a trifle vulgar, but exquisite,” observed Azrael. “Accepted. Let’s pass on to the soup.”
“Bird’s-nest soup?”
“So be it.”
“For the next course, I propose offering you a Yangtze unicornfish and an elephant’s trunk, Hong Kong style. Four young elephants fed on wild thyme and aromatic plants have just arrived from India.”
“And what will you give us for an entrée?”
“Lophophore palates and a fish of your choice. As a roast, would the Messieurs like a Madagascar monkey with truffles, or a pheasant?”
“The monkey’s more delicate, provided that it’s a black-fronted Maki; its relative, the mococo, is bitter.96 Let’s see—it only remains to decide on the fish. What are you going to serve us? I’m tired of the vulgar fish reared in your parks; I’d like something less commonplace—a mackerel, for example, brought to the table alive in the Roman manner and cooked before the eyes of the guests, so that they can enjoy the metamorphoses to which its beautiful colors are subjected.”
“Nothing simpler. I’ll go down in the diving-bell myself; if the Messieurs will deign to accompany me, they can choose the item that suits them.”
“Gladly.”
Without giving me time to hesitate, Azrael and Carême-Dugléré led me toward a kind of small square building that was at the edge of the sea. We went into it through an elegant door that was carefully closed and sat down in armchairs. Carême-Dugléré pulled a cord and we immediately descended to the sea bed. An electric lamp illuminated in the water in front of a large window of thick glass did not take long, thanks to its dazzling glare, to attract thousands of fish of a hundred species. Azrael pointed at a gigantic mackerel, and an ingeniously-disposed net moved by a simple electric mechanism immediately fell upon the poor fish and captured it.
“Let’s go back up now,” said Azrael. Before he had finished speaking he opened the door of the diving bell and we found ourselves back on the quay.
“The fish we’ve just caught will only come out of the sea to be transferred to our table,” said Azrael, “and will thus furnish us with delicious meat. But we still have twenty-five minutes to spare before we go take our seats. Would you like to go fishing ourselves in the meantime, in the Seine?”
That’s a singular idea! I thought, privately, while Azrael signaled to a locomobile to come and pick us up. I have never been able to understand the stupid pleasure of throwing a hooked line into the water, on which nothing ever comes to bite except a bleak or a gudgeon, and I thought it very bourgeois of my friend Azrael to propose such a vulgar means of killing time.
In two and a half seconds the locomobile took us to the Pont-Neuf—which did not prevent Azrael from chiding the mechanic for his slowness.
I was scarcely listening to that reprimand, which would have seemed excessive at any other time, because the sight presented to me by the Seine made me squint in amazement.
In fact, the Seine was covered with boats, which served as both habitations and boutiques for thousands of fishermen clad in the most picturesque fashion.
“Let’s see,” said Azrael. “Where’s Master Nicolas, who looks after my flock of herons and pelicans? Good! He’s seen me—here he comes.”
In fact, an elegant yawl, moved by an internal mechanism, came flying over the water, landed at the foot of the statue of Henri IV, took us aboard and ferried us to a boat moored under the Pont des Saints-Pères. We had scarcely stepped down when thirty herons and pelicans ran toward Azrael, surrounded him and lavished their caresses on him, as dogs might have done.
“Master Nicolas,” asked me friend, while returning the birds’ caresses, “I can’t see my pelican Flock.”
“Flock isn’t very well,” Nicolas replied. “Yesterday, the gold ring that I’d attached to his neck so that he wouldn’t swallow the fish he caught and kept in the pouch of his beak came loose. Instead of bringing back the fish, the glutton swallowed them all, with as much slyness as greed. I hope his indigestion isn’t serious, though; I wouldn’t want to see it prolonged, for all the world, for I don’t know another pelican in Paris that can fish like him.”
“Here, Rosamonde, here my beauty!” shouted Azrael to a magnificent female heron, which hastened to run to him. “You’re not a glutton, are you? And I’ve trained you so well that you have no need of a gold ring to stop you eating fish. Go fetch me a carp.”
Immediately, the heron drew nearer to the boat, stretched out her long neck, opened her huge wings, flew off and settled on the water, where thousands of fish were swarming, thanks to the progress obtained by the art of pisciculture. She dived, and came up with an enormous carp in her beak.
“Well done, my beauty! Well done!” Azrael said to her, throwing the carp back into the water. “I’d like a pike now.”
Rosamonde raised her intelligent head toward Azrael with an expression of doubt and hesitation.
“Are you afraid?” Azrael asked her. “Haven’t I taught you the fashion in which it’s necessary to take hold of the pike in order to have no fear of its teeth? Go on—I want a pike. Obey!”
The heron flew off again, glided, and plunged into the water, but it was evident that she had found a redoubtable enemy with which she was fighting. After a couple of minutes Rosamonde reappeared, her feet bloody and her feathers bristling; in her beak she was holding, not a pike but a small alligator, which she threw, dying, on to the deck. Then, suddenly taking off again, she did not take long to disappear into the Seine and bring back a pike.
“You’re a good, brave bird! Here, I’ll give you this whole pike for your dinner.” He turned to me. “But let’s think about ours, my friend,” the continued. “Let’s go back to the Café Carême-Dugléré.”
We climbed back into the locomobile, which only took 1.4 seconds to transport us this time.
“You’ve got your revenge, my dear mechanic. Well done! Here, this is to help you to forget my grumbling just now.” And Azrael slid a hundred-franc bill into the mechanic’s hand
“Well?” he asked me, afterwards. “What do you think of my flock of herons and pelicans? I’m sorry that you weren’t able to see Flock fish. One of our most celebrated sportsmen offered me thirty thousand francs for him, but, in all conscience, he’s worth more than that—and besides, I wouldn’t want to get rid of him for anything in the world. Can you imagine that the bird is so intelligent that he can bring back a specimen of each of the fish you list for him before sending him forth? The other day I bet that he wouldn’t make a mistake in a list of thirty different fish, and I won my bet. There wasn’t a single one missing from his beak-pouch.
“What you’d have to admire even more are my falcons and my dogs, for, although hunting is a cruel pleasure, at least we don’t procure it any longer by treacherously killing an unfortunate defenseless animal with the brutal weapons that our ancestors called rifles and shoguns. Pooh! The mere thought of the explosions they must have produced gives me a headache. Someday, I’ll take you to hunt one of the kangaroos that swarm in the forests around Paris—the beautiful forests that date back a century and keep the capital’s air healthy. You’ll see then what my dogs are worth.”
While he was speaking we arrived at a kiosk on the fronton of which the word Journal could be read in fiery letters, and into which a numerous crowd was incessantly pouring. We followed the crowd and found ourselves in front of a machine, an artful combination of electricity and mechanics, which produced thousands of printed sheets instantaneously and relentlessly, which were distributed to everyone in exchange for a five-franc gold coin.
“I’m distinctly behind the times with regard to the news,” said Azrael. “I only read the first eight issues of the Journal this morning. I still need to peruse these six to get up to date. Can one believe that in the 19th century a single issue of a newspaper appearing in the evening sufficed the worthy individuals of that era? The poor souls! They were not like us, brought up to date on an hourly basis with the serious or frivolous events that succeeded one another by the minute throughout the world. However, the still-too-restricted mode of publication of our present-day newspapers will be subject to a further development that has become indispensable. The Journal has announced that it will appear every ten minutes henceforth. Within a week, the nine hundred other newspapers in Paris will be forced to do likewise if they don’t want to lose a quarter of their five hundred thousand readers.
When we emerged from the offices of the Journal we went into the Café Carême-Dugléré and took our places in the room where we would be dining, and where a table was already set, served with a sumptuousness of gold plate and crystal that is indescribable. A bookcase of carefully-selected and elegantly-bound volumes containing the most celebrated works of all eras permitted the diners to keep the tedium of waiting at bay by means of riveting reading.
My God, I thought, since I’m here, although I don’t know how, in 2865, I’m curious to know which French authors have survived the test of time. Let’s see: Molière and Walter Scott, complete works; Le Sage, Le Diable boiteux;97 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie; Augustin Thierry, Conquêtes des Normands. Good! Let’s pass on now to those who were alive in 1865...
At that moment, the door of my study opened noisily, and instead of my friend Azrael, I saw my friend and physician Dr. Amédée Forget,98 who hastened to establish a current of air by opening both battens of the window, with no less noise than he had made opening the door.
“Are you mad?” he demanded. “Staying shut up like this in a study full of ether vapor! It’s enough to anesthetize you to death! Thank God nothing unfortunate has happened, if not to you, at least to my friends Flock and Mademoiselle Mine. They’re both asleep, in what seems to me to be a singular and perhaps troubling slumber.”
Master Flock stretched and came to caress my friend, barking; Mademoiselle Mine leapt on to his shoulder in order to embrace him better, and I rubbed my eyes.
“Oh, my dear chap!” I exclaimed. “What a fine thing progress is! In 2865…”
“Come on, you’re still asleep! Wake up and come with me for a walk on the boulevard.”
Alas, I said to myself, with a sigh, picking up my hat in order to go with my friend, we won’t see the marvels that my other friend Azrael has just shown me!