(1857)
I. The Ruins of Paris
From the summit of an isolated mountain, as arid as those which form a gray ring around Jerusalem, my gaze overlooked an immense, uneven plain strewn with ruins as far as the eyes could see. A river with muddy waters traversed that valley of desolation from east to west.
My initial surprise was son succeeded by a solemn grief; I had recognized the point of the globe where the city of my birth stood, the city that inspired so much love and so much hatred, so much admiration and so much scorn: Paris, the vast reservoir of all grandeurs and the receptacle of all turpitudes.
Suddenly, a distant and mysterious voice vibrated in the air, and harmonized with my melancholy thoughts. It sang, with a plaintive modulation, a hymn as sad as the limitless desert, like the canticle Super flumina Babylonis.15 I could not reproduce the melodious notes, but I have remembered the meaning of a few verses:
“O Paris, Paris! The shadow of our splendid edifices no longer falls upon the flagstones. Nettles with stinging sap have come to turn your now-soundless streets and squares green. The specter of ruins has passed over you, and your proud columns have collapsed on the ground.
“The Seine has seen the willows of old Celtic Gaul reborn on its banks. Only the seething foam of its waves, around heaps of mossy stones, indicates the places spanned by the bridges with massive piles; their debris flows away in fine dust to mingle with the Ocean sands.
“River Seine! The mirror of your waters no longer doubles, when night falls, the thousand lights of illuminated palaces, or the twin towers of the ancient cathedral. Your waves undulate amid the silence, and you resemble a desolate mother weeping all her tears over the cadaver of her child.
“What were the instrument of the divine will? Was it you, rapid messengers of human vengeance, bullets invisible in flight? You, subterranean furies of volcanoes without issues? Have the abysms of the catacombs swallowed up your high towers, vast cupolas born of their entrails?”
The voice expired in the immensity, and I slowly descended the hill. It was that of Montmartre. One could no longer see, as of old, windmills and a telegraph on its crest, waving their huge arms, to feed the capital the bread of distant news. Its bald silhouette stood out sadly against the leaden horizon to the north.
At first I did not know how to combine these anticipated catastrophes with the intimate memory of the century in which I lived, but my imagination was gradually able to reconcile the two contradictory states. I seemed to remember that I had been dead for a long time, and that I had just been reborn into the world.
Having wandered through a labyrinth of formless ruins and deserted, humpbacked roads invaded by brambles, I recognized the location of the garden of the Tuileries, where the members of the Parisian élite, with their petulant tendencies and precocious intelligence, had once met up beneath the quincunxes of chestnut trees. Near a sort of pot-hole, I found some debris of the Luxor obelisk, twice-antique plunder of the ancient cradle of the world.
Suddenly, a sound became audible, the increasing intensity of which agitated the atmosphere. I raised my eyes and perceived, floating in the air, an immense aerostat with sails, which had just dropped anchor a hundred paces away. I saw a numerous company of people get down, clad in white robes and wearing turbans of the same color. Their language was not easy to grasp; it was an entirely new sort of French, much modified in its consonance and pronunciation. They were considering me with a kind of mocking hilarity; that was, I thought I understood, because of my costume, which was very bizarre in their view.
The dragoman of the troop questioned me as to my age and homeland. Collecting all my memories, I replied that I was born in Paris during the reign of Napoléon the Great. There was an outburst of general laughter. One of the most earnest turbans in the group said to his neighbor: “Leave the poor man in peace and let’s go straight on to the objective of our expedition.”
They were unanimous in regarding me as a cretin or a visionary, and no one paid any further attention to me. I took advantage of that compassionate silence to watch the exotic savants at work.
“I doubt,” one of them said, “that we’ll be able to reap much of a harvest of bronze medallions here, for toward the end of the forty-ninth century, those Kouktman vandals”—probably the invaders of French soil—searched carefully for them, in order to found cannons.”
They all launched into a thousand conjectures regarding the stone or marble debris that they encountered on their route.
“Here,” said the doyen of the troop, “Are three mutilated columns, still standing, from the church of the Madeleine; here once stood the palace known as Les Invalides—which is to say, the infirm—which was one of the most sumptuous monuments of the right bank.16 You can admire the vestiges of the portico that ornamented the entrance to that vast edifice.”
All his colleagues applauded this ingenious explanation, with one exception, who dared to say: “There never was a portico in front of the Hôtel des Invalides. In a fragment of an ancient book, for which I paid its weight in gold, there was no mention of it at all, and moreover, I read there that the immense house in question was established on the left bank of the river.”
The doyen’s face contracted and took on a ruddy tint. “For my part,” he replied, dryly, like a man who takes offense at contradiction, “I’ve also read books as ancient and authentic as yours, and I dare to advance with certainty—certainty!—that on the very spot where we are now, stood the Palais des Invalides, otherwise known as the Infirm. The peristyle, gentlemen, had twelve fluted columns, three of which are still here, before your eyes.”
A sort of secretary, leaning his elbow on a capital, was taking the whole discussion down in shorthand. He would have to render an exact account of it to the public of some country overseas. I drew nearer to him and read at the head of the page the date 7 July 9957.
As I was burning to know with what foreigners I was dealing, I approached the dragoman, who was smoking some aromatic plant delightedly, and I questioned him. He understood me perfectly, and replied; “Don’t you recognize, by their costume alone, the inhabitants of the celebrated city of Archeopolis, situated in the part of the globe that the ancients called Central Africa?”
I stood there astounded.
“What!” he continued. “You’ve never heard mention of our capital, the queen of the civilized world, or the famous museum of antiquities that our worthy sovereign Matoupah IX founded some three centuries ago—the museum whose buildings alone occupy a surface of more than a hundred thousand square meters? Have you, then, always crouched down among the ruins of the Celtic deserts?
On my affirmation that all this information was new to me, he proposed to knock me into shape, to take me to his illustrious homeland and introduce me to the court of the king of the Archeopolitans—doubtless, I thought, privately, to put him in a good humor.
A soon as the company’s engineer-topographer had made exact plans of the remains of the important edifices of ancient Paris, preparations were made for departure. In accordance with my protector’s proposal, I was lodged in a small compartment of the aerial vessel, which contained food-supplies and some exceedingly complicate scientific instruments. The machine, I was told, had been fitted out at government expense, with all the necessary comforts.
I would gladly communicate to the reader the details I was given on this subject, but unfortunately, everyone wanting to enlighten me at the same time, my memory, like a vase filled too quickly, was unable to retain any of it.
As it was appropriate for me to have a decent outfit, I was made to throw away my hideous cylinder of black felt and my cockchafer-tail suit. Then they draped over my shoulders some sort of mantle of a dazzling parrot-green color, the white being reserved for government antiquaries, doubtless as an allusion to their candid innocence. Afterwards, a sort of bizarrely-formed turban of the same color was fitted around my head.
II. The Bulgers of Archeopolis
After a continuous fight over the deserts of southern France and the Mediterranean, favored by the northerly wind, we descended the flowing day, shortly after dawn, in one of the outlying districts of the immense and noisy city, named Archeopolis, I was informed on the way, because a wandering caravan of antiquaries had founded it six or seven thousand years before.
From certain whisperings of the learned society, I realized that I would be retained in the capacity of a curious beast, in some royal menagerie. Thus, as soon as I set foot on the ground I hastened to decamp and flee at top speed over the macadam of the capital of the civilized world of the year 9957.
As I saw a sufficiently large number of cloaks and turbans similar to mine circulating in the streets, I no longer feared being recognized by my scientists. Nevertheless, for the sake of greater security, I went into a sort of petty barber’s shop and had myself shaved, moustache and side-whiskers included, so as to resemble the generally beardless indigenes as much as possible. I paid in 1858 sous, which the barber—something of an antiquarian, as everyone there was—accepted with abundant gratitude.
Thanks to that precaution and the national costume in which my paltry frame had been draped, I was able to traverse part of the city without causing the dogs to bark unduly and without the Gallic form of my nose exciting too many sniggers from the rather ugly women that I perceived sitting on broad terraces.
I ended up finding a large edifice in my path decorated with the inscription: ACADEMY OF THE BULGERS. There, I was told, some twenty professors were maintained at the expense of the State. I entered resolutely into a large courtyard bordered by porticoes. On the far side was a façade in a rather grandiose style, surmounted by several domes shining golden in the sunlight.
First, I noticed an astronomical telescope with a very large aperture on a distant platform. It was at least fourteen meters long and was mounted on an exceedingly complicated and bizarrely shaped pedestal. People nearby were referring to it as a marvel. The lenses garnishing the two ends were, they said, so clear and powerfully refractive that the ensemble, perfectly centered, magnified a planet’s diameter a million times. Thanks to that giant eye, added a scholar in a canary-yellow cloak, a bloody battle taking place on one of the plains of Mars had been observed the previous month.
I took that story as an old joke, based on the reddish tint of the planet and the belligerent name that it still retained, and said to myself: It’s warmed-over humbug, proof that the antique tradition of the art of the tall tale has been religiously transmitted over the centuries to this brave African nation.
In a minor courtyard I perceived a transport balloon, somewhat different from the one that had brought me. Someone told me that the ingenious inventor of that machine, whose baroque name escapes me, had attempted a successful trip around the Moon.
“These,” someone else added, “are the very simple means that he had employed to travel beyond our atmosphere, to breathe, to combat the extreme cold and to pass without any shock from the Earth’s sphere of attraction to that of its satellite: firstly...”
But at that very interesting moment, my narrator disappeared, as if by magic. I was striding rapidly along a gallery, hoping to recover his tracks, resolved to cling on to his cloak until he reached the end of his account, when I found that I had somehow arrived under the cupola of a vast amphitheater, where a short bald man was gesticulating from the height of a pulpit. He was the first individual who had appeared to me without a turban.
I was told that I was in the audience of a lecture by the illustrious and very eloquent Professor of History, Fissbrek de Hardeynagh.
That sublime intelligence had chosen for its lodging an extremely ungraceful ball that resembled, in profile, the body of an orangutan, but what attracted my attention most of all about his person was an enormous bulge protruding from the left of his skull, which was bare at that point. I enquired naively about the manner of infirmity with which he seemed to be afflicted.
I learned, to my amazement, that these sorts of ignoble blisters were the object of profound veneration here. One said of an individual: “He is a Bulger,” in the same majestic fashion of which we say: “Monsieur Such-and-such is decorated with the grand sash of the Légion d’honneur.”
The ancient system of Dr. Gall—designated, of course, by a new name17—had acquired a vogue in Archeopolis of which one can hardly communicate an idea. People there took note of the slightest swelling of the cranium, maintaining it by means of a thousand medical dressings;18 the hair around it was shaven in order to expose it to the sunlight and facilitate its development. Ominous reliefs were flattened, or even, in certain cases, amputated in infancy. On the contrary, those that prognosticated a definite aptitude for mathematics, poetry, erudition or any fine mental ability were fortified and encouraged. Skulls of the same species were brought together in series, and associations formed of abilities of every sort. Every child who had the good fortune to be born with a clearly-pronounced beneficial protuberance was sure of being well cared-for, of making rapid progress and becoming, before the age of twenty, a model Academician, if not a model Academic.
I was gripped by a keen curiosity regarding the results that this system of classification had produced—the aristocracy of the bulge, as the envious classes of Archeopolis put it. Thus, I immediately forgot the narrator of the excursion to the Moon, in order to open my ears to the sonorous waves that the singular doctor’s speech caused to vibrate. At that moment he was readjusting the folds of a large scarlet toga that appeared to be causing him some embarrassment; then he resumed, in a tone laden with pathos:
“Finally, to conclude my comparison between our epoch and ancient times, finally, are we children of Old Africa, we inhabitants of the temperate zone of the globe, not the true elect of Providence? A few thousand years ago, our land, so fortunate today, was still a vast and arid desert of sand, scorched by the fires of the sun, but God displaced the ecliptic in our favor.
“Today, all the elements that constitute our plant being equilibrated, there are no further examples of those sudden fermentations that once shook cities and turned them upside-down. The seasons and the winds have adopted an almost regular course; thus, no one any longer lacks bread, and human intelligence has taken flight in a manner unknown to the old races, who thought they had attained the limits of civilization.
“We are only subject to a small number of the maladies identified by ancient authors, and we only know the name of the terrible scourge that depopulated the world so many centuries ago: the Asiatic cholera, of which people spoke in terror. Let us mention in passing one of the moral sores of those remote times: the duel, that social scourge, born of pride and a false sense of honor. The duel no longer exists among us. Our tribunals are sufficiently powerfully organized no longer to allow a particular tribunal to exist in the conscience of each individual.”
This speech caused me to retreat into myself; I said to myself: I’m surely dreaming; I’m in the land of chimeras. Then I finished up convincing myself that I was witnessing a real session, and that the evils of my nineteenth century were nothing but a dream, nothing but a very distant memory.
Here the orator’s majestic pronunciations were succeeded by a calmer tone of voice in order for him to add, after a pause, a sort of postscript:
“Such is, gentlemen, a succinct summary, based on the fragments of an ancient chronicle that miraculously escaped the ravages of time, fire and the poor constitution of the paper manufactured in France. Such is, as I say, the revelation of the causes that led, in the latter part of the twenty-first century, to the general decadence of global civilization. The second lecture in the course will be specifically devoted to the mores and customs of the French.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “The illustrious professor Fissbrek de Hardeynagh has given an account of the events that led to the fall of our civilization, and I wasn’t here! It’s enough to make one throw oneself from the top of the Observatory Tower, which is said to be two hundred meters high!”
And in my despair, I was about to climb the one thousand three hundred steps that led to the platform of that tower when a thought stopped me. What if I were to pay a visit to the eloquent professor instead? Perhaps he would satisfy my curiosity briefly—although I strongly suspected that conciseness was not his dominant quality. Onwards!
III. The Decadence of Twenty-First Century Civilization
The illustrious Bulger received me with grave benevolence. I explained the purpose of my visit and my keen regrets. That step appeared to flatter his vanity. I finished by asking him whether, by any chance, the first lecture in his excellent course might have been published.
He contemplated me with an indulgently ironic smile. “Of course—but where do you come from, my dear sir? What! You don’t know facts of history that the most worthless of our schoolchildren know thoroughly...”
At that moment, he rang a hand-bell, and a domestic appeared. “Tell little Robinet to come here immediately!”
A frisky brat of five or six with a mischievous expression soon arrived. I was sympathetic enough to be anxious about a red swelling he had on his forehead. Poor kid! I thought. He must have fallen down three flights of stairs!
It was me who fell from a height when I heard the professor say to him: “Let’s see, child. You, who have such a fine relief of memory, recite to this gentleman chapter twenty-six of my Great Annals of France. If you get it right, you can have a double ration of jam with dessert, you hear?”
And he became to recite, while shifting his weight from one foot to the other, the following pages:
“By the middle of the twentieth century,19 the sciences, the arts and industry had attained their apogee in the civilized nations of the globe, which were linked together by railways, electric telegraphs and submarine tunnels. Machines, infinitely multiplied and applied to everything, had very nearly eliminated the employment of human strength. Almost by themselves, they built houses and worked the land, sowing and harvesting, made bread, furniture and clothes, and killed and butchered the animals destined to feed the public. The poorest individual could procure all the objects of basic necessity in return for the light duty of supervising, in shifts, the movements of a few machines placed under the direction of an engineer; no one was unemployed, save voluntarily.
“It was said that it was the return of the Golden Age, but make no mistake: that epoch was the Age of Iron, in moral as well as physical terms. The state of material well-being attained by humankind gave birth to its ruin. It seemed that God wanted to punish humans for having stolen too many fruits from the tree of Science. The multiplication at certain points of the globe of railways and telegraph wires disrupted the normal action of the electricity of the atmosphere. In certain conditions, those immense metallic networks repelled the fertilizing snow of winter and the benevolent storms of summer.
“Previously-unknown maladies afflicted the human species, and the plants and livestock that served to nourish it. In the entrails of the globe, a tidal wave of vague incandescence rumbled, which shook portions of the terrestrial crust that had previously been spared. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the great capitals of Europe, shaken by volcanic efforts, saw a fraction of their habitations collapse, and about the same time, contact with a comet asphyxiated all the peoples of America.
“Religious faith had taken refuge in the depths of a few elite intelligences as if in its ultimate sanctuary, but public worship was a mere matter of form for the majority. Dispossessed of the benefit of manual labor, entire populations lived inactively from day to day, ennui and the cold sentiment of realism in their souls. Everywhere, idleness, having become chronic, had engendered a disgust for life that was translated into thousands of suicides. A fatal inertia of the body and the heart! Among the masses, only brains, and no longer arms, worked; it was a reversal of natural law. Never had a more ardent thirst for the superfluous, the marvelous and unrealizable projects changed the human imagination for the worse. The study of arts, letters and the sciences was no longer the exception but the banal objective of everyone. Everyone thought himself called to a great intellectual role; everyone wanted to be an enchanter, but there was no more enchantment. Printing presses, multiplying everywhere, relentlessly vomited out millions of books at rock-bottom prices. All the evil passions spread their contingent of redoubtable poisons through those vast arteries of social life known as literature.
“Great moral convulsions followed close on the heels of this mortal virus. Reason deserted brains as religion had retired from consciences. Rivalries of love, wealth, commerce, celebrity and political influence degenerated into desperate battles, basely hypocritical, egotistical and perfidious. About 2050, an epidemic madness propagated from individual to individual.
“The civilized nations were then ruled by governments impotent to master the passions in the absence of religious restraint, and composed of strangely complicated mechanisms. Their heterogeneous elements, associated in an artificial manner, constituted a power comparable to powders that fulminate at the slightest agitation; they were monarchic democracies, or, if you prefer, democratic monarchies. It was sufficient, for there to be an explosion, that the monarchic principle turned to extreme tyranny, or that the democratic base degenerated into demagogy. That was the final element that led to the catastrophe. An accusing voice rose up, from no one knew where, to signal the hatred of the masses for the chief engineers who represented financial power, and the aristocratic class.
“Thousands of newspapers made themselves the echo of that fatal voice. Then was realized the ancient apologue of the Limbs and the Stomach. By virtue of the weakness of a fictitious authority and the rapidity of the means of communication, all the peoples rushed toward the same abyss at the same time. A conspiracy was organized that burst forth simultaneously at all points. Everywhere, the engineers were stripped of their wealth or massacred and the machines annihilated, save for those designed for destruction—the only ones that were to survive, to the misfortune of humankind.
“In those days of boundless fury, the châteaux and farms were burned. The fire only spared a fraction of the reserves of seeds, developed by means of ingenious methods, which human intelligence had taken centuries to produce.
“A few ages had attempted in vain to enlighten that blind rage, but what could an atom of reason accomplish in the midst of that general dementia? Soon, necessity removed the blindfold. Attempts were made to re-establish the agricultural machinery, but the agricultural experts had been killed. It was decided that labor would be temporarily confided to human muscles, as in barbaric times; unfortunately, the courage that had been so ardent to destroy weakened in the face of the slow and painful travail that had nourished previous generations.
“The last alimentary resources were squandered by the strongest, as on a raft of shipwreck-victims. Famine ensued, which sowed cadavers; then plague, which multiplied by airborne infection. The earthquakes completed the work of destruction. Only Death brought in a harvest that year.
“A few families succeeded in taking refuge in taking refuge in a remote part of Central Africa. We are the descendants of those families, who miraculously survived the sinking of the immense ship of ancient civilization. We have rediscovered the ingenious inventions of our ancestors, and have added our own to them—but, instructed by the great catastrophe of the twenty-first century, we employ the machines that assist manual labor, and exhibit in or museums, as mere curiosities, those which suppress it.”
“Good! Very good! Perfect!” said the professor of ancient history. “Get back to your game of guinguiche;20 you shall have the promised double ration.”
Young Robinet ran off at top speed.
As for me, I thanked the venerable Bulger with reverent insistence, and went to get a little air under a portico.
IV. An Archaeological Conference in the Year 9957
I remained downcast for some time beneath the weight of that lugubrious story, recited by a child. It had impressed me to such an extent that I no longer thought of raising any doubt as to the authenticity of the fats recorded in Monsieur de Hardeynagh’s chronicle.
Suddenly, I was distracted from my sad meditations by the conversation of two students, who were talking about a course on French Antiquities. I asked them to tell me where it was taking place.
“A few steps away,” was the reply. “If the subject interests you, you couldn’t do any better—today there’s an extraordinary meeting of the Academy of Antiquarian Bulgers; the most renowned scientists will be speaking at it.”
I followed the two young men and installed myself with them on a bench.
While waiting for the opening of the session, I asked a neighbor who was in a communicative mood for information about the great library of Archeopolis, which, I had heard, contained a hundred and twenty-five thousand manuscripts and more than two million printed volumes, as many ancient as modern.
I learned that that immense deposit of the products of human intelligence had long been classified and so skillfully catalogued in a set of two hundred folio volumes that one could instantly locate any published work on any particular subject. There were thirty categories of books; there was a department head in charge of each one with a proportionate number of fetchers and replacers under his orders. In his exceptional memory were arranged, as in reality on the shelves, all the books in his category. The principal function of that living table of contents was to enlighten people doing research, or simply in search of information.
I began once again to think that I was dreaming.
“From what class,” I asked my neighbor, “are the department heads of each category of manuscripts recruited?”
“From among the craniums that have the most pronounced triple bulge of probity, memory and benevolence.”
“But isn’t that of erudition also required?”
“That’s carefully avoided! There was a time when renowned Bulgers were placed in charge of manuscripts. They greeted novice savants with red and pedantic faces; they could not be bothered to disturb themselves for those petty enquirers, and ended up turning them away all the more willingly as they thus reserved the most precious unpublished documentary sources for themselves, their friends and colleagues. Rules then existed that favored the egotistic system in question, but one of our most judicious monarchs, the august Matoupah IX, put an end to that sort of abuse. I’d explain how, if the session were not about to begin.”
It was, in fact, opening. I would have like to be able to triple the number of my ears. It began with a partial raising of the curtain, in order to give the numerous laggards time to arrive. Whatever the celebrated professor had said about the displacement of the ecliptic, the climate in Archeopolis was far from temperate; a tropical heat reigned there, and its inhabitants moved with a extreme slowness. In consequence, half a dozen papers submitted to the Academy were read out. I was particularly interested in one that bore the title: On the occasions on which the ancient French pronounced the sacred phrase: God bless you! The author concluded, on the thirtieth page that “The exclamation was evidently addressed to individuals who had the whooping cough.”
That unexpected resolution made me laugh, but, except for me, the entire audience retained an imperturbable gravity.
Once the petty hors-d’oeuvres were out of the way, the true session began. I saw a noble individual come in, clad in a white robe ornamented with ostrich-feathers, whose skull offered two superbly-gleaming protuberances; the more ample was, it was said, that of numerical sagacity. The honorable Bulger was charged with reading the report of the men in the balloon on their excursion to the ruins of Old Paris. That report was so majestically prolix that I shall show mercy to the reader and only cite the last part:
“On the ninth of July, after a difficult march over an uncultivated plain, cluttered with mossy stones and strewn with the debris of windows, slates, and marbles of various hues, we paused on the edge of the Synn—the Seine of the ancient chroniclers—at the place that had once been site of the gardens of the Tuileries, a word that signifies delights.21 It was, as we know, one of the most frequented locations in the immense capital of a thousand gates.
“In a gully full of brushwood, where a snake of an exceptionally dangerous species was hissing, we fund a horse’s head in white marble, rather primitive, which has been placed in room number 729 of our National Museum. This fragment was collected a short distance from an ancient highway of great breadth, leading to a town named Vaersall or Versaëlles, an ancient name which, as our honorable colleague Monsieur Hernoïl”—Monsieur Hernoïl took a bow—“has demonstrated, means ‘the town to the west’, thus called because of its occidental situation in relation to Paris. Everything leads us to believe that the horse’s head in question was part of a monument erected in the idle of one of the gardens of the Tuileries to Constable Bonnaparth, who, after the death of Louis XVII, his sovereign, was proclaimed head of state, under the allegorical name of Napoléon, a word of Greek origin signifying ‘lion of the forests.’22 That hero, who died on the island of Corsica, founded a dynasty celebrated in the history of the destiny of France.
“Further away, toward the place where a magnificent basilica stood, covered with silver gilt plaques, known as Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a short distance from the ruin of the Louvre, we exhumed a bronze candelabra still partly gilded, on which were sculpted in relief the three letters I. H. S. One so-called antiquary, drawing from I don’t know what apocryphal source, has argued in a pamphlet, which cannot be seriously refuted here, that these three letters, also featured on two antique vases in our museum, originally signified: Iesus Hominum Salvator, or simply IHESUS. He adds that, in consequence, monks named Jesuits, taking the same letters as the motto of their order, gave it another meaning: Iesus Humilis Societas.
“We shall not enter into more ample detail regarding this singular opinion; to advertise would be to attribute value to it. Our personal research has put us on the right track. In the sixteenth century, under king Henri (the second or third of that name) lived a famous sculptor named Jean Goujon or Gonjou.23 Now, the heads of the cherubs decorating this candelabrum are certainly attributable to an artful chisel, so we do not hesitate to do honor to that artist, so celebrated in the annals of ancient art. We interpret the monogram thus: JOANNES, the forename of the said Goujon or Gonjou, HENRICI SCULPTOR. The cross positioned over the letter H is no embarrassment; it designates that the king in question was very Christian, rex christianissimus, as the old chronicles say.24 I think one would search in vain for a more satisfactory explanation.”
I shrugged my shoulders, itching to give vocal support to the oppressed antiquary, but the long and unanimous applause that greeted the conclusion of the learned Bulger did not permit me to raise my voice.
When the enthusiasm had calmed down completely, the orator immediately passed on to another exercise. He had a heavily-oxidized bronze passed around the room, on which the following inscription could be deciphered: GASPARD, BREVETÉ S. G. D. G.25 I understood immediately where the cylinder came from and what the four initials signified.
I was about to elucidate the question briefly when the savant raised the venerable debris—from the pump of a clysoir26 of my own time—over his head and addressing the sympathetic members of the audience, who were holding their breath, said:
“We do not know today, gentlemen, exactly what purpose this ancient bronze tube served. Was it part of an astronomical instrument, a musical instrument of a weapon? That is what I hope to clarify shortly in a quarto volume whose first three hundred pages are in press. I shall limit myself here to a very probable supposition with regard to the word BREVETÉ. It is doubtless the name of a family of industrialists well known in the twentieth century or thereabouts, for it can be read on several fragments that we already have in our museum. It is preceded by other forenames such as Grégoire, Crépin, etc.27 As for the four letters S.G.D.G., I confess that I have spent many sleepless nights searching for their meaning. I hope to succeed, with the collaboration of the honorable Monsieur Hernoïl”—Monsieur Hernoïl took a bow—“in interpreting them in an incontrovertible manner. Thus far, we are inclined to favor the hypothesis that the four letters indicate the birthplace of the Breveté family.”
At this point in the speech I could take no more. I got to my feet with the firm intention of enlightening the assembly, even if the president gave orders to throw the indiscreet interrupter out, and was about to launch into my explanation in good faith when a sort of usher, advancing into the middle of the hall, called out in a bass-baritone voice: “Messieurs, it is six o’clock!”
At that sudden exclamation, all the bulging heads stirred and were covered with turbans. More than one honorable colleague woke up with a start, delighted to have attained the closure of the session and the proximity of dinner-time.
On seeing that entire colony of frogs start hopping, I burst into such crazy laughter that I woke up myself, and found myself in the midst of my nineteenth-century household implements.
Of all that I thought I had heard, only five words had really been pronounced: “Monsieur, it is six o’clock.” At the same instant, the same voice repeated them. It was that of my domestic, who, following orders given the day before, had come to tell me that it was time to get dressed, because I had to set off at eight o’clock on a trip to visit the ruins of Rome.