(Georges-Frédéric Espitallier)
(1896)
That year, the elements seemed completely out of sorts. It’s true that people say that every year, which appears to indicate that being out of sorts is the elements’ natural state. Which was good luck for Max Eginhard, who, having nothing else to do, thanks to his considerable fortune, had devoted himself to meteorology. When the weather is fine, meteorology is a sinecure, while one throws oneself into it wholeheartedly when atmospheric disturbances are abundant.
The origins of Max Eginhard’s considerable fortune were not lost in the night of time, and his intimate friends still remembered the epoch when his maternal grandfather had sold cloth for other reasons than to oblige his friends.
The said grandfather possessed an uncultivated plot of land on the heights of Chaillot; the idea had occurred to him to increase the size of that embryonic property. Who could tell? Wasn’t there going to be building in the neighborhood?
“Great cities grow westwards.”
He therefore bought land that cost him very little, but remained on his hands, with the result that when he married off his daughter, he gave it to her, in order to get rid of it once and for all.
The son-in-law, who was devoid of flair, found at first that this unproductive terrain was more cumbersome than a bad of loose change, but when the operations commenced that were to culminate in the transformation of the Monceau and Marbeuf districts, he finally perceived his father-in-law’s clear-sightedness; the fallow land was an investment for the father of a family. One morning, he woke up as rich as the late Croesus. With the fortune, he became bold, but without acquiring the flair that was definitely not part of his patrimony; he bought vast steppes east of Paris, not doubting that the great city, in letting out its belt, would rapidly transform them into residential housing.
Alas, he forgot that “great cities grow westwards.” He died before having seen anything built on his land but a few ragpickers’ shacks—tenants not accustomed to paying high rents. Nevertheless, thanks to the immovable properties he owned to the west, his heritage left no cause for complaint.
His heir had been brought up in the comfortable idleness befitting his fortune and had as little flair as his father, with the result that one day, having finished with the partying in which he had indulged more out of snobbery than temperament, he woke up one day to find himself a trifle empty. It was then that he discovered a vocation for meteorology.
It began with rather vague indications. Looking at the sky as he got up in the morning, he said: “Look, it’s going to be a fine day,” or: “The sky’s cloudy; it’s going to rain.” These observations, judicious as they were, did not exceed, as you can see, the bounds of banality—but, the desire gripping him to know more about them, he stuck his nose into books, put a weathervane on his house and bought barometers of various kinds in order to check them against one another.
He did not fail to attend meetings the many organizations in which the most modest members could, if they had a mind to do it, contribute their little stone to the edifice of science, in the form of notes, contributions and lectures that did not have the solemn and intimidating manner of communications to the Académie des Sciences. And as he generously subsidized scientific enterprises, he very soon won the consideration that attaches to Maecenases.
He was not entirely satisfied, however, being ambitious for the kind of apostolate that consists of instructing one’s contemporaries. Not daring to set his sights as high as a chair in the Collège de France, he affiliated himself to the Mutual Admiration Society, the Panphilotechnique, which offered to let him teach geology courses under its auspices.
That was not really his subject, but, all things considered, geology and meteorology are not without points in common; they even provide one another with mutual support. He only had to read up on the former science before teaching it. That is what he did.
Utterly ignorant of everything that it comprised, he possessed the unappreciable advantage, he said, of starting without preconceptions. Received ideas and acquired theories did not exist for him; he would be able to give the science a new impetus, by virtue of his new and profound observations.
His inaugural lesson was a colossal success. Addressing himself to Parisians, he thought that he ought to chose a “very Parisian” subject: the constitution of the Paris basin. The orator renewed that already-old theme by the unexpectedness of his exposition, and gave it the piquant zest of a contemporary manner of speech.
“Messieurs,” he said, in substance, “the Paris basin merits that name because it affects the form of one of those household utensils known as bowls. And if, not content to examine the inside of the bowl, we seek to take account of its underside, we observe that the Parisian ground is not just one bowl but a stack of bowls, of increasing dimensions the deeper one goes, because the containing vase has to be larger than the vase contained.”
This reason seemed to convince the audience; one young lady, especially, sitting in the front row, did not hide her admiration for the eloquent professor, who continued:
“And that holds good to the enormous thickness—yes, truly enormous—of six hundred meters, where the stack rests on a bed of sand—Gault sand—disposed there for the express purpose of collecting the water filtered by that vast basin, while underneath, a clay mold, forming an impermeable bed, like any respectable clay, retains that water, under pressure, that the artesian wells bring back, in part, to the light of day.
“If, departing from the center of this improbable pile of vessels—I mean Paris—we now follow a radius outwards, it’s natural, is it not, that we successively encounter the different layers, each one terminated by a border from which one falls on to the following plate. That change of terrain is clearly marked, especially as one walks eastwards, because, in distant epochs, waters have eroded all the soft or sandy parts partly masking the more ancient formations, as they still cover them in the plains of Beauce and Normandy—with the result that, in advancing toward the Vosges, one encounters a series of crests one after another, some of which form veritable cliffs; and these crests seem to have been placed there so expressly to serve as barriers against floods of invaders that the towns and villages that mark them out almost all bear the names of battles.
“First there is the superb arc of a circle passing through Montereau, Nogent, Sézanne, Epernay and Laon, which limits the tertiary bowl—which is to say, the soil of the Île-de-France itself, well-named, for, as Monsieur de Lapparent51 says: ‘the tertiary massif, eaten away along its border, seems like an island, emerging in abrupt cliffs from the bosom of a vast chalky plain. From time to time, a profound fissure interrupts the cliff and a river flows through it as if through a gully. Thus does the Seine at Moret, the Marne at Epernay, the Vesle and the Aisne outside Reims, the Oise at Chauny, the Brèche at Clermont, the Thévain on the outskirts Beauvais, anticipating the moment when, united in a single flow, the waters of all these rivers quit the tertiary mass between Meulan and Mantes by another defile, the latter less visible because of the rapid rise of the limestone in Normandy.’
“Beneath that tertiary bowl, there is the enormous and thick chalky plateau of Champagne, limited by the arc of Troyes, Brienne, Vitry, Saint-Menehould and Valmy. Then the less accentuated crest of the Argonne, departing from which we encounter the greensand of the Barois, before reaching the Jurassic strata of the arc that goes from Chatillon-sur-Seine to Chaumont, Toul and Verdun. Is that all? No, for beyond that is the concentric line from Langres to Montmédy and Mexières, which forms yet another line of defense—the first.”
Here the orator thought it appropriate to include a little patriotic couplet pronounced with a tremolo befitting morsels redolent with pathos.
“Oh, Messieurs, as I speak, the diplomats are trying to calm the hot heads of dispute raised once again by the hereditary enemy. Is it not to be feared that the great voice of the canon might suddenly interrupt the conference and overturn protocol? This very day we find ourselves under arms, on the frontier, and, in order to defend the territory of our dear fatherland foot by foot, we shall be able to take advantage of obstacles that Nature herself has been able to design on our soil!”
A murmur of enthusiasm ran through the audience, and an old white-haired gentleman got to his feet to utter an energetic: “Vive la France!” while waving his hat.
It was under the emotion of that vibrant peroration that Monsieur Eginhard bowed to his audience and gathered his papers together.
A few moments later, he went out into the street and headed for home. But at the moment when, getting down from the carriage, he was about to go through the door, two people hurried forward. They were, on the one hand, the young lady who had shown so much enthusiasm at the beginning of the lecture, and, on the other, the old patriot who had so vigorously applauded its conclusion.
“Just one word, Monsieur!” cried the lady.
“I need to talk to you!” shouted the gentleman.
Eginhard was perplexed.
“Madame…Monsieur…the street is doubtless not the most propitious place for conversation, and, if you would like to come up to my study...”
“Monsieur,” the old patriot insinuated, as they climbed the stairs, “What I have to say to you will brook no delay, and if Mademoiselle will be kind enough to permit...”
“But no, Monsieur, my confidence is certainly as urgent as yours...”
“Madame…Monsieur, please,” the professor interjected. “Gallantry dictates my duty, and since you have only one word to say, Madame, be good enough to come in, while Monsieur will wait for a moment in the drawing-room.”
Scarcely had the study door closed than the young woman said, excitedly: “Your lecture was sublime. It has inspired me with such enthusiasm that I have come to ask you: will you marry me?”
It must be admitted that, thus taken by surprise, Monsieur Eginhard could not find a reply before the lady had taken up the thread of her discourse. “Oh, I know! That goes against what is conventionally called propriety in your country. Personally, I’m an American—an American of Spanish origin; I have the blood of Pizarro in my veins, and I’m volcanic, as one says in your country. I’m rich; I love science and travel. A scientist like you needs a wife who understands him and who can also liberate him from the anxieties and material cares that waste his energy; I will be that wife...”
Eginhard was quite nonplused by this unexpected passion, so brutally introduced into his life. He was not immune to flattery, however, and, on raising his eyes, perceived that his interlocutrice was pretty. But still! To have to reply immediately, without having had time to reflect...
“Well,” said the other, in a conclusive fashion. “That’s settled. I’ll go and announce it to my family—and now, you can admit the old gentleman.”
She was already opening the door. “Oh! I forgot to tell you my name. Carmencita Calcinata y Constancia. Here’s my card.”
Eginhard darted a glance at it while she made her exit like a gust of wind.
“Why,” he said. “She’s one of my tenants in the Marboeuf district.”
He did not have time to take the course of his reflections any further, however, for the little old man irrupted into the room. He introduced himself: “Victor de Sourdillon, senior clerk in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, retired. My occupation has given me a nose for European complications, and after one retires, the instincts of the profession subsist. Well, Monsieur, I’ve come to tell you, because you appear to me to be the enlightened patriot of whom I’ve dreamed, that we are dancing on a volcano.”
“It’s certain, Monsieur...” Eginhard interrupted himself, searching for the name.”
“De Sourdillon,” the other finished, naming himself again.
“It’s certain Monsieur de Sourdillon, that the Parisian basin, without exactly being a volcano, is in a state of perpetual agitation—which is a bad omen for the solidity of our monuments. We are sinking, Monsieur, and Fourier—not the Phalansterian but Fourier the mathematician, less well-known to the general public because he was more sensible—has calculated how many millions of years...”
“Oh, never mind such distant catastrophes. War is at our gates! Have you read yesterday’s newspapers? The latest uprising in Armenia has lit the fuse. Germany is taking advantage of it to contest our most sacred rights, and England is ready once again to eat the chestnuts that we have pulled out of the fire. The political barometer is exceedingly low.”
“The barometer! That reminds me that I omitted to look at mine today.”
While he went over to the instruments, Monsieur de Sourdillon continued: “Well, Monsieur, that situation cannot last. I thought that, in a democratic State, it was the responsibility of every citizen to help, within the measure of his means, to solve the great problems seething on the green carpet of democracy.”
“The barometer’s going down,” said the other, who was doubtless listening distractedly.”
“With a few friends, I’ve founded the Foreign Club,52 in which we examine questions of foreign politics, with the objective of giving the minister the benefit of our enlightenment: that’s first-rate private initiative, and very valuable, for, not having the prejudices of career diplomats, for the most part, we’re able to bring new and often unexpected solutions to weighty questions. That is the eminently useful work in which I’m inviting you to collaborate. A man of your competence has a place marked out for him among us...”
Eginhard was following his own train of thought. “The barometer’s truly afflicted with St. Vitus’ Dance. Look at that crazy curve! What perturbations! I wouldn’t be astonished if there were serious changes in the sunspots.”
“You ask me: why have you given a foreign name to an association so truly French? To which I reply that, ‘club’ being an English word, it’s entirely natural to attach an epithet of the same provenance to it. Then again, do we, the French, have a short and clear word to express the same idea? Evidently not, and in consequence...”
“The seismographs are also indicating abnormal vibrations of our terrestrial crust...”
“Ah, the seismographs! Oh well—but isn’t it strange that the repercussions make themselves felt in the chronic agitation of our colliding nations?”
“That’s an eminently philosophical point of view, which does you credit, Monsieur.”
“We understand one another marvelously, and I shall hasten to inform my committee that you’re accepting the presidency of the Foreign Club.”
“But Monsieur...”
“Don’t protest; it’s settled—and as it’s necessary not to restrict ourselves to vain words, I shall publish a pamphlet tomorrow concerning the defense of our frontier, basing my argument on your admirable theories regarding the forms of the terrain. Oh, the tertiary cliff—what a role, what a great role I shall reserve for it, in accordance with the enormous role it has played in history!”
At that moment, through the open window, they heard the cry of a news-vendor, running and shouting at the top of his voice: “Get La Patrie! Latest news! Germans at the frontier! Grave complications in the East! Mass conscription! Get La Patrie!”
“Eh? What is he shouting?” said Monsieur de Sourdillon, choked by emotion. “You’ll soon see whether my fears were chimerical! I’ll go call a meeting of the Club immediately. You’ll come—tomorrow, eight o’clock in the morning. Don’t miss it!”
He seized his hat and gloves and hurtled away, leaving Monsieur Eginhard bewildered, his head leaning out of the window, while other hawkers were running from all directions, barking their disturbing news—and the passers-by, suddenly gathering, were snatching the papers from their hands.
What a lot of events in so few minutes in the life of the pseudo-intellectual! An engagement on the hoof; affiliation to a Club of amateur diplomats; and war, the threat of war, about to trouble the quietude of his placid egotism!
He tried to go back to work and, sitting down at his desk, took up the notes he had prepared for his second lecture. He read aloud, striving to acquire an oratorical tone.
“Nature loves variety; she has taken care to compose the bowls stacked in our Parisian basin of different materials; and, the better to limit that ancient cradle of our fatherland, she has caused to surge from her loins three enormous supports, made of granite and eruptive rocks: three solid boundaries emerging from the primitive crust, constituting a sort of gigantic basket, into which are fitted the sedimentary layers, whose edges are lifted by the irresistible upward surge.
“Everything rests on the solidity of those supports. If the whim took them, under and energetic interior pressure, to draw closer together, the stack of dishes would be shattered, and towns and villages would fall pell-mell into the cracks, along with their inhabitants.
“Fortunately, such a catastrophe is improbable; I will say more...”
Eginhard interrupted himself to look at his seismograph, which was definitely going crazy.
“Either I’m much mistaken,” he said, “or we’re going to have an earthquake...”
And, as the barometer no longer appeared to him to be on its best behavior, he added: “…and a cyclone,” while the newsvendors were shouting outside, advertising the political storm.
A gust of wind seemed to confirm his prognostications. He got up to close the window, just as his valet de chambre came in and presented him with a letter on a tray. It was written on scented paper, in an elongated green-tinted envelope sealed with aventurine.
Eginhard opened it and read these lines, written in a delicate hand, and unsteady orthography:
Mi amigo,
I will not abandon you to the perils of an invasion, siege, famine and bombardment. I shall elope with you, and we will depart for the Argentine Republic, where my flocks graze, tomorrow morning, by the eight o’clock train.
Carmencita.
An elopement and a meeting of the Foreign Club at the same time was too much, and in the absence of the gift of ubiquity...
Desperate to resolve this difficulty appropriately, Eginhard went to bed with a headache.
On getting into bed it seemed to him that the ground gave way beneath him, which he attributed to the nervous state he was in—but he could not mistake for an illusion the whistling of the wind, which was raging, furiously shaking the shutters.
Nevertheless, he got to sleep in the end.
How long was he asleep? He would have been incapable of answering that question when, feeling himself abruptly shaken, prodded and poked, he woke up in the midst of a frightful racket.
Opening his eyes with difficulty, in the dark, it seemed at first to be impossible to take account of what was happening around him.
He was lying on the carpet, his limbs bruised and aching, in the midst of a chaotic mess of colliding furniture and the noise of breaking glass and porcelain.
From the lower floors of the house—doubtless from the entrails of the earth—rose strange rumblings and dull cracking sounds, to which other cracking sounds, more sinister still, replied in the walls, shaking on their foundations...
And the floor was oscillating like the deck of a ship...
The sudden horror of that anguished awakening squeezed the unfortunate professor’s throat and paralyzed his screams.
He groped around him, crawling through the debris until he finally bumped into the door.
He stood up, tried to open it, and succeeded in spite of the resistance of the frame, put out of square by the shocks.
Throughout the house, from top to bottom, there were already lugubrious interjections, overlapping calls for help, slamming doors and cries of fright. Then, by the light of candles lit by feel, white shadows moved—people in nightshirts running in panic.
People called for help, and people helped themselves, but, not dead but wounded, they all found themselves standing up and more-or-less intact. The walls had not collapsed, and they thought themselves fortunate to have got away with the fear and the material damage that the nascent daylight permitted them to estimate.
Two further shocks made themselves felt, but the people were battle-hardened, and they were over quickly. Nevertheless, the tenants, fearing that the house might collapse on their heads, felt an urgent need to get out.
Eginhard had gone back into his room and, searching for his scattered clothes, dressed in haste, but he did not want to leave without having consulted his cherished instruments, in order to demand the secret of the abrupt cataclysm. The recording devices were lying around all over the place. He gathered them together. As was only to be expected, the seismographs displayed an enormous smear where the pen had marked crazy oscillations.
As he sought to replace on the table the objects that had been thrown on the floor, the meteorologist noticed his compass, and was suddenly struck by a strange and inexplicable fact. The needle had deviated by an entire quadrant!
There was no doubt about it; he was perfectly familiar with the orientation of the walls of the house, whose windows opened due east and west; the compass was now pointing at one of them. Was it necessary to suppose that the building had suddenly been rotated by ninety degrees? Or had terrestrial magnetism suddenly undergone in implausible metamorphosis?
Eginhard remembered in a timely fashion that in many circumstances, earthquakes have provoked rotatory movements. It seemed that the house really had fallen victim to an effect of that sort. It was a miracle that it had resisted such an effort, which inertia usually transforms into a torsion dislocating the entire edifice.
It was urgently necessary to get out of the tottering building. Instinctively, the professor put his compass in his pocket and went down to the street as quickly as possible. He was not unsurprised to observe that the walls, in spite of a few cracks that rendered the anticipated torsion manifest, had nevertheless remained almost vertical on their foundations; it was, therefore, the foundations themselves that had rotated—and as the house had conserved its position relative to the other houses in the street, the whole street must have been subject to the same movement. Eginhard verified that by taking out his compass and orientating it. His bewilderment knew no bounds, however, when he observed that the angle of deviation was even greater than it had been a short while before. The movement was continuing! Paris was slowly rotating!
A thought suddenly occurred to the scientist…the thought of a landlord. His properties that had been east of Paris the day before were moving northwards. Oh, if the movement could only continue, what value they would acquire!
“Great cities grow westwards!”
He did not have time to take the reflections that were already consoling him for the public misfortune any further. In the street, where people were running around lamenting their fate, coming from opposite directions, Carmencita and Monsieur de Sourdillon appeared, hurtling toward Eginhard.
“Querido!” cried one.
“Dear Master!” exclaimed the other.
And the latter murmured, bad-temperedly, on perceiving the Argentinian: “Oh—that madwoman again!”
“Come quickly,” Carmencita continued, breathlessly. “Let’s run to the station. I won’t stay a moment longer in this Babylon, crushed by divine wrath.”
“Our friends are already assembled at the Club,” said the other. “I’ve come to collect you.”
“Ah!” Eginhard replied. “In the great peril that threatens France, while the enemy hordes are already at our gates, my place is at the frontier. I’m hastening there! I’m must fly!”
He did, indeed, fly,53 dragged away by the robust and volcanic foreigner. But Sourdillon would not surrender his prey, and lengthened the stride of his short legs to catch up with the couple.
“You’re right—to the frontier! I’ll bring the entire Club to the frontier with us!”
Eginhard would dearly have like to climb into a fiacre and obtain a little relief from so much emotion, but the earthquake had cracked all the causeways and overturned the wooden sidewalks, and no carriage was risking traveling in all that chaos. It was therefore necessary to make his decision and go on foot—but they could not agree to a direction. Sourdillon wanted to go to the Gare de l’Est and Carmencita the Gare de l’Ouest.
It was Eginhard, again, who cut to the heart of the question by saying: “What good will that do, since Paris has rotated? The eastbound railway will no longer take us to Le Havre, and the westbound one will surely take us to Bordeaux. All roads lead to Rome…but I’m still not absolutely convinced of that, for if we’re on a rotating platform, there must be, at the edge of that inopportune circle, a disjunction of roads, railways, and even rivers—with the result that it would require a hazard that I would qualify as providential if the rotation should stop at the exact moment when the line to Chalon happened to be passing that to Amiens, or for the waters of the Oise to flow into the bed of the Seine. I would be curious, all the same, to know whether the rupture has taken place at the rim of the tertiary bowl, as it would be logical to suppose...”
“In that case,” said Carmencita, “in order to satisfy the old gentleman, let’s go to the Gare de Lyon; that will be the best way of going northwards; we’ll finish up reaching the sea and a steamer that will take us to my homeland. I don’t say that there are no earthquakes there, but one never sees cities spinning like tops.”
The old gentleman was only semi-satisfied to be thus designated, but he contented himself with this transactional proposition. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll go fetch the Club members.”
Gallantly, Eginhard offered his arm to the Argentinian woman, who set off, swaying on her hips like a launch agitated by the swell and watching her slender feet, only wanting to set them down judiciously in the midst of the confused rubble that had once been the flat surface of a pavement.
At that moment, some bill-posters passed by at a run, their ladders on their shoulders, leaving behind them, displayed on the walls, placards in which the municipal council reassured the public against any panic.
This was their approximate tenor:
Citizens
At the very moment when the enemy is invading our frontiers, and English fleets are menacing our African possessions, and even our Mediterranean coast, a frightful cataclysm has just struck your city.
The authorities owe you the truth; they will hide nothing from you. The terrain that once constituted the Île-de-France, under subterranean forces that it is not possible for us at present to check, and for which the Prefecture of Police will take sole responsibility, has become unstuck and is rotating on its axis. What was north is now south. That, without doubt, will be no bad thing, for, after all, it is only just that everyone should enjoy in turn the advantages and inconvenience of location and orientation. Where the question becomes complicated, however, is the manner in which the edge of this islet accords with the neighboring regions that have remained in place, immobile.
It was inevitable that his readjustment would take place as best it could, and that it would be much like what happens when a clumsy domestic sticks the limbs of a carelessly broken statue back together. The fracture will have dragged Melun away, leaving Fontainebleau immobile in its sands and its forest, breaking the Seine between the two towns; the Marne has been severed between Château-Thierry and Epernay, the Aisne near Craonne, the Oise below the Fère and the rest in accordance.
The railway lines stop, broken at that improbable cut-off point, along with the telegraph lines. Employees are reconnecting the wires in all directions as quickly as possible and at random, but the Paris offices are confounded by the Chinese puzzle posed by the inevitable entanglement resulting from such a reconnection; the distribution tables are now a mosaic devoid of significance.
In sum, Paris is without communications. We resemble shipwreck-victims on a vessel derived of a rudder, and, to complete the analogy, we shall probably run out of water. During the rotation, in fact, our aqueducts have broken, and if they still carry a liquid having all the appearances of water, it is because they have collected it from the lakes in which rivers abruptly cut off from their mouths are accumulating. How can such water be assessed? It is no longer that beverage, as pure as it was hygienic, that we have disputed for so long with the river-dwellers of the Avre and the Loing! Today, they are keeping their water, and we Parisians, after so many sacrifices agreed by your Municipal Councils—drawn on the public purse, of course—we are reduced to drinking an unnamable liquid. The Board of Hygiene, urgently consulted, has unanimously decided that it would be better not to drink it, thus absorbing unknown microbes to which we have not had the leisure to become accustomed in the manner of Mithridates, as happens every summer for the waters of the Seine, surreptitiously introduced into our conduits.
Such is the situation, dear fellow citizens.
But that is not all.
We have received, just now, an alarming phonogram from the observatory, and are delivering it to your appreciation: ‘The latitude of Paris is gradually but sensibly increasing.’
“That’s horrible! It’s terrible!” Eginhard exclaimed, having read it aloud. “And unless the Earth has chosen a new axis of rotation, which science refuses to admit, I don’t see what it implies.”
He had not finished expressing this remark when more bill-posters stuck up a new poster beside the first. This one was signed by a well-known promoter of the Paris Seaport54 and was thus conceived:
VICTORY
That which the authorities have refused to our legitimate claims, nature has given us gratis: PARIS SEAPORT is a reality, without it costing our shareholders a single sou! All that it required was a simple cataclysm.
While Paris was being shaken by the worrying earthquake that terrified us all last night, the Massif Central of France was subjected to an even more frightful convulsion and was raised up by several hundred meters. The news reached us by means of the optical telegraph that has just been established, in a matter of hours, between the two lips of the fracture that appeared so strangely at the edge of the tertiary basin of Paris.
Lifted up with the central plateau, however, were the sedimentary layers that were spread out at its feet, which now form an immense inclined plane, extending all the way to La Manche. Over the soft clays and marls interposed between these various layers, Paris is gently sliding, along with its suburbs, and in a few hours it will be on the shore of the sea, doubtless destroying the mortal enemies of the great project of PARIS SEAPORT, Rouen and Le Havre, unless those conceited cities have already sunk beneath the waves in the same seesaw motion that elevated the Auvergnat plateau!
Only one thing remains for us to desire: that our vessel will stop in time and not, by virtue of its acquired velocity, fall into the sea—for it is much heavier than water and would doubtless sink, in spite of the motto of the city of Paris: fluctuat nec mergitur.55
It is Melun that is serving as our prow—Melun, which a fortunate evolution of the basin has carried northwards. The PARIS SEAPORT Company invites all its supporters to go to Melun, in order to be the first to salute the sea. A special train has been organized for ten o’clock in the morning at the Gare de Lyon.
HURRAH!
“Quickly, to the Gare de Lyon!” cried Eginhard, gripped by enthusiasm.
He spotted some porters who had thought of improvising filanzanes, in order to transport their fellow citizens like simple Hovas,56 on the backs of men, through the obstacles of the disrupted streets. Soon, he and his companion were on their way to the Gare de Lyon at the steady trot of these businessmen of a new breed.
One might have thought, in fact, that all Paris had arranged to meet there; the station platforms were crowded with people who were taking the army trains, and Eginhard fell into the arms of Monsieur de Soudillon, who was surrounded by the kindly members of the Foreign Club. They were all shouting as loudly as they could, while waving little tricolor flags: “To the front! To the front!”
An ovation was given to the already-celebrated professor of geology, who nevertheless demurred when asked to make a speech.
“This is not the time for words, my friends,” he said, “but for actions. At the frontier, we shall find the words that set hearts on fire!”
A formidable pressure transported his entire audience on to the first train to depart; the locomotive whistled, and the train was soon rolling northwards at top speed.
Eginhard was sitting between Carmencita and Sourdillon, who were both intent on serving as deacons to the high priest of science, and both talking at the same time about different things. Pulled in opposite directions by these demanding acolytes, the professor did not know which one to listen to, and clasped his head, which seemed to be about to explode, with feverish hands.
Dominating the tumult of the carriage, Sourdillon was sketching a plan of diplomatic diversion, in which the members of the Foreign Club would be sent forth as sharpshooters to negotiate with the enemy. In the meantime the leader of the band would go to appeal for help to the Pope and the Negus, hoping that the slowness of protocol would permit them to bring the Church’s cannons and the Libya lions to bear before the end of hostilities.
While these words were hammering Eginhard’s right ear, however, the latter was lending his left ear to less transcendent suggestions.
“In my homeland,” murmured the Argentinian woman, we sing this:
Olé!
The storm bursts in the bosom of the earth,
The hurricane roars in my heart,
The volcano vomits lava, and my heart breaks, vomiting its blood!
Who betrays us dies; and we die afterwards!”
Damn it! thought the scientist. That’s enough to dispel any thought of treason.
“Our mothers carry daggers in their stockings, and we hide revolvers in our belts, mio caro, to reckon with the unfaithful. Oh, let’s flee, let’s flee to the pampas of my native land!”
The conversation on this theme seemed rather embarrassing for Eginhard, who was doubtless unfamiliar with the practice of replacing the mandolin with a revolver.
Fortunately, they were approaching the terminus; the locomotive slowed down, its brakes screeching, and soon stopped, steaming, beside the platform of Melun station.
“All change!” cried the employees—which was perfectly natural, since the broken track stopped there, to the despair of the troops who were occupying the station, the town and its surroundings. Their mobilization orders had specified that they ought to embark at six o’clock in the morning for Belfort. It was midday; the line no longer existed, and instead of going south-east, the ground itself was taking them northwards. A colonel tackled the stationmaster, complaining that the Network Commission ought to have been able to anticipate the eventuality.
“And in the meantime, the enemy is free to establish themselves on our territory, take out fortifications and advance on Paris. What’s going to happen, when they arrive on the Epernay-Craonne-La Fère line, and no longer recognize the valleys through which all invasions take place? They’re going to say that our maps are worse than ever! And not to be there to land a blow!”
The promoter of Paris Seaport provided a fortunate diversion by intervening. “Oh, Messieurs, be glad that you’re not on the eastern front; isn’t it at least as honorable to maintain a garrison in an entrenched camp that’s on the move? Spare a thought for the perplexity of the enemy, whose objective has slipped away and vanished! Their cleverly-ripened plan has gone down the river; their preparations were in vain; everything has to be started again, and, confronted by the strangeness of the phenomenon, their strategic science remains indecisive: a momentary hesitation! But that’s salvation! Our armies, of which you are only on part, gentlemen, will easily form up in a province on the flank of their line of operations and…but what’s that? A pigeon coming down!”
They ran to the bird, under the wing of which appeared a light tube contain dispatches, and while they looked everywhere for an authority to whom the grave responsibility of reading them could be left, everyone began to discuss the thorny question raised by the arrival of the carrier-pigeon.
Certainly, the bird possessed an admirable instinct, and, crossing mountains and oceans, was able to return to its dovecot, without anyone having sufficiently explained, in my opinion, by what mysterious cerebral mechanism it bring that incomprehensible sense of direction into play—but how could it recognize it if, as in the present case, the entire country containing its shelter had started to displace itself on the round ball? Even the cleverest had to admit that they did not know; it was a miracle that the pigeon, evidently bound for Paris, had landed on the Île-de-France in distress.
At the same time, someone wondered exactly where that crazily-drifting ship was. A former naval officer proposed to take a bearing, as if on board. It was necessary to run around all the optician’s shops in the town to find a sextant and the mercury to form and artificial horizon to substitute for the marine horizon.
Finally equipped, the former frigate captain stood with his legs apart, as if to resist the swaying of a deck, consulted his chronometer, raised the sextant toward the sun, and...
A frightful clamor stopped him in mid-gesture.
“The sea! The sea!” cried a thousand voices.
Binoculars were immediately aimed. A few kilometers away, a cloud of dust rose up, denouncing the rapid progress of that singular sled, and when the wind dispersed the cloud, the waves were shining in the distance.
At a vertiginous speed, they advanced toward the roaring gulf. Everything was going to fall into it. Only one hope remained, which was that the moving stratum was thicker than the water was deep.
To begin with, on reaching the cliffs that had one sheltered so many charming seaside resorts, which had already disappeared beneath the waters, the enormous calcareous mass cracked as it fell.
There was an immense scream of terror, while a frightful shock knocked people down on top of one another, and buildings collapsed with an indescribable din.
Then, equilibrium was gradually restored, and, the surface of the land not sinking any lower than the level of the water, the gigantic islet continued to slide over the bed of La Manche.
Extreme situations temper the character of individuals. All the emotions that the passengers on that singular raft had experienced in a few hours had hardened them, and, from the moment that they had withstood the initial impact, it seemed that they no longer had any reason to be afraid.
However, as they got nearer to the deepest water, the water-level reached the surface of the ground, invading the lower areas first and forcing the inhabitants—I mean the passengers—to take refuge on higher ground. Soon, though, they had passed the thalweg and as they climbed up the opposite slope, the land gradually emerged again.
Hope was reborn, and Sourdillon tried to profit from it to harangue the club members, while the prefect, to whom the carrier-pigeon had been taken, appeared waving a piece of paper over his head. It was the dispatch.
“Rejoice, Messieurs. Our eastern frontier is no longer under threat. The elevation of our central plateau had as its counterpart the collapse of the Rhineland, which is under water. It’s a barrier sufficient against any invasion, for the moment. We no longer have anything to do but march upon the conquest of England.”
At the same moment, a new impact shook the ground; the raft had run aground on the English shore, crushing Portsmouth, Brighton and Newhaven and stopping when it ran into the South Downs.
England was no longer a island!
Sourdillon wanted to run ahead, in order to be the first to set foot on British soil, as the Norman conqueror had once done. He took Eginhard by the arm to drag him away, but the latter took out his watch.
“What time,” he asked, “is the train to Liverpool, and what day is the liner to America?”
It was Carmencita who replied, and with what an incendiary gaze! “We’ll be able to say,” she added, “that to go and get married, we haven’t taken a banal vehicle.”
“Oh, we’ll come back,” he assured her, “for I haven’t forgotten that I own land in Paris that is now west of the city, and ‘great cities grow westwards’—it’ll be worth a fortune before long. But I don’t want to occupy myself any longer with geology, or meteorology—they’re too complicated.”