(1854)
Paris will only truly be Paris in the twentieth century.
One can demolish the old Medieval city, pierce new streets, combine palaces with hyphens, build kilometers of boutiques, plant promenades, invent rivers and hollow out artificial ponds, but Paris, in spite of these fortunate masonic revolutions, will still remain the rainy city, the somber city, the muddy city, the city embarrassed by Henri IV and Boileau.
It necessary, in the end, to render Paris habitable, and above all to institute the divorce of man and the umbrella.
Man was not born to open and close an umbrella until he dies.
The rain has been, since Pharamond was elected under a pavois—an umbrella19—the jailer of Parisians. Every Parisian is condemned from birth by the rain to ten years in prison.
That has lasted for fourteen centuries.
There have been insurgencies against all tyrannies and they have all been overturned; only two tyrannies still remain: rain and the porter.
“It is the sun of Austerlitz,” Napoléon said, several times. Those six words give pause for reflection. There was, therefore, sunshine at Austerlitz, a battle fought on the second of December in the north
We also read, in the history books: “It was a beautiful spectacle: the cuirassiers of Caulaincourt hurling themselves upon the great redoubt, defended by sixty cannons, at the same moment the sun, veiled since the morning, made breastplates of the cavalrymen resplendent.”
That scene occurred in the month of September, at Borodino, near Moscow, in a land where the sun is only known by reputation, which has obliged all the tsars, since Peter the Great, always to gaze eastwards, like icy Tantaluses.
Austerlitz, Borodino and Moscow thus prove to us that there is an ingenious method for obtaining sunlight, even in midwinter, even in the heart of the north.
It is a matter of firing numerous cannons.
On the second of December 1805 and the seventh of September 1812, Austerlitz and Borodino would have kept their eternal cupola of rainy mist; fortunately, France passed that way, fired a few thousand cannon shots, and showed the sun to the bewildered Muscovites.
The Russian general Pyotr Bagration, wounded on the great redoubt, pronounced as he fell these memorable words: I die content; I have seen the sun!” He owed that joy to us.
Will these great historic examples be wasted for the future of Paris? No. The remedy will at first be greeted as a paradox; then it will have the fate of all paradoxes; it will emerge from is well, mirror in hand.
The future aediles, exonerated of loans of fifty million, will one day erect twelve cyclopean towers, one per arrondissement: towers a hundred meters high, which will already be superb as viewpoints. The summit of each tower will be equipped with a circular battery of a hundred cannons, and if the slightest could rises at any of the cardinal points, fire away!
The cloud will hold its assembly somewhere other than the Portes Saint-Martin or Saint-Denis; it will burst over the countryside, and fecundate gardens; no trace of it will ever again be seen over Paris.
It is war declared against the enemies of the air.
Too bad for the merchants of umbrellas, successors of Pharamond; they will change métier, like coaching inns and postillions.
Parisians will say every day, as they pass the Vendôme column with dry feet: “There is the sun of Austerlitz! Three hundred and sixty-five suns of Austerlitz per year!
The merchants of umbrellas can sell parasols, if they do not want to change their estate.
But that is not the only service that the twelve towers might render the twelve arrondissements.
Under the last years of the idle reign of Louis Philippe, one saw on the Place du Carrousel a beacon that resembled a miniature sun. A simple trial: the modest germ of something immense that will one day—which is to say, one night—be resplendent over the twenty thousand roofs of the capital.
The luminous power of the beacon of the Carrousel will be multiplied a hundred fold, ten times that if necessary; twelve suns of electric flame will rotate at the summits of the twelve imbrifuginous towers, and every evening the daylight will be reignited after sunset; the odious night, nox atra, that mother of crimes, accomplice of thieves and murderers, will be suppressed.
It will be possible to see clearly at midnight.
No more drunken patrols; no more wheezing sentinels; no more rounds; no more gas explosions; no more national guard....
What benefits!
Let us pursue this work of the future.
Another paradox: there are no fountains in Paris. The naiad who believes that the waves sculpted by Jean Goujon belong to her, fluctus credidit esse suos, is mistaken.
A naiad is obliged by her profession to make water clear, and the water-carriers only fish in troubled waters in the fountains of Paris.
How is it that Paris, an essentially academic city, a city that imitates the Romans in comedies, tragedies, triumphal arches, votive columns, temples and popular sedition to such an extent that Paris would have lived for fourteen centuries with its arms crossed if Rome had not invented columns, tragedies, battles, Places Vendôme, Chambre des Députés, full cisterns, geniuses suspended on the right foot, Renown, circuses, the seditions of the forum, Brutuses, Cassiuses, civil wars. Alexandrine verses, advocates, triumphal arches, porters, Academicians, Champs-de-Mars, insulting slaves, rostral columns, garden statues, liberated women and saturnalia…how is it, I repeat, that Paris has forgotten aqueducts of spring-water in its innumerable imitations?
Aqueducts! What a lacuna!
The Romans had a river too, a yellow river like the Seine; they could have caused specimens of the unfiltered Tiber to run through artificial fountains, but their aediles had too much respect for the lips of the sovereign people. They constructed, at enormous expense, infinite successions of monumental lines, which brought water to the sovereign people over triumphal arches, according to Chateaubriand’s beautiful expression.
As soon as a spring of superior quality was discovered, an Eau Laffite, a Naiad Chambertin, like virgin water, that liquid treasure was captured, and dispatched to the thirsty lips of the Romans across thirty kilometers of aqueducts.
Too bad for the merchants of adulterated Falernian, or the ungodly substance baptized lustral water! The people, in love with the new naiad, intoxicated themselves in a hydraulic orgy, and deserted the altars of the false Bacchuses, crowned with ivy, at the corn-stalk crossroads.
The Parisian imitation will be belated, but it will come.
Paris will have serious fountains, like the Barcaccia, the Trevi and the Piazza Navona.
It is time that water was drunk in the département of the Seine.
The false Bacchus has done enough harm to the lovers of liquefied campeachy.20
The Seine, like the Tiber, is a purveyor of bathing stations or a school of natation. It does not flow in order to slake the thirst of human throats; if one saw in a solar microscope the infamous atoms it ferries, one would die of thirst rather than drink a glass of its water.
In the Midi, the flavorsome bounty of spring water renders people sober and spares them the vice of drunkenness.
The hideous locution pourboire,21 passed into the mores of the North, would cause a southern worker to wilt, if he made use of it. One does not fortify oneself there with alcoholized campeachy.
In Rome, the athletes drank water; Milo of Crotona never went into a wine-merchant’s shop, and he could stun a bull with a blow of his fist. If we think that hyperbole, let us say a calf, and that is still not bad.
The hills surrounding Paris are immense reservoirs, which are only awaiting aqueducts and joint-stock companies to inundate our fountains with virgin naiads. They will come from the heights of Meudon, Franconville, Ermont, Saint-Leu-Taverny and all the other hills and petty mountains neighboring Paris, as the heights of Soratte and Tibur neighbored Rome at an almost equal distance.
Providence never places reservoirs too far distant from thirsty lips, having said: Give to them who are thirsty to drink. That order was not addressed to wine-merchants.
That same good Providence watches over Paris with a thoroughly maternal care, and its vigilance increases as the paths of circulation are encumbered with wheels, horses and pedestrians.
Another thing that the future promises
What we see today on our boulevards cannot last long; it imposes too many cares on Providence, the economical guardian of public cobblestones and macadam. Choose a point of observation on the boulevard—for example, the area that separates the Passage Jouffroy from the Passage des Panoramas. One bears witness, for hours on end, to a strange spectacle.
In the middle roll, march, fly and gallop, in a frightful pell-mell, fiacres, omnibuses, coupés, citizens, milords, rigs, handcarts, big carts, diligences, tilburys, artillery trains, and every machine ever invented for breaking cobblestones, crushing toes, killing horses, deafening ears and stopping traffic.
In that turbulence, hardy pedestrians, on tiptoe, umbrellas in hand, fight madly, in greater danger than Turks during a sortie from Silistra.22
On the threshold of the passages men and women, as immobile as the shades of the Styx, ripae ulterioris amore,23 await the least dangerous moment traverse the boulevard bristling with perils: that Strait of Magellan where the mobile reefs cross paths; that long archipelago of harnessed Cyclades pursuing travelers; that dark gulf in which two eyes are insufficient to see Charybdis to the left and Scylla to the right.
And we are still in the first epoch of Aurelian Paris! The Appian Way has not yet planted its two boundary markers on the two seas. Come a complete railway, merely come the year 1854, and we shall see pedestrians who are too prudent or pusillanimous retained for entire days on one of the two sides of the boulevard, without finding a faint momentary clearing to promise them a fortunate crossing.
The shades of the Styx sometimes waited for a century to pass over to the other side, but they had the patience that death and the absence of business bring. The day that sees a distraction of Providence over that section of the boulevard will also see a proposal burst forth from the bosom of the Parisian aediles. A municipal voice will say: “Since bridges are thrown over dead rivers, it is necessary to throw them over living rivers.”
Perhaps shareholders will come together to build those bridges at their expense, and they will make fortunes if they are authorized.
The first bridge, which will serve as a model, will be constructed between the Passages Jouffroy and les Panoramas, at the confluence of two enormous cities, one of which always has urgent business in the other.
That bridge will have a colossal arch; people will cross it by mounting two broad staircases; it will be surmounted by a covered gallery with restaurants, cafes and reading rooms, with windows opening on to the two horizons of the boulevard, The success of the first bridge will determine other shareholders to operate at other points.
The boulevards will be traversed as the Seine is traversed, from the Invalides to the Jardin des Plantes; the perils of the crossing will be suppressed over land and over water, and Providence will breaths again.
Those bridges thrown over the boulevards will create a new kind of monumental architecture; they will unite their great lines with the infinite roofs of edifices and the majestic perspectives of horizons. But of all these ameliorations promised for the future, the most important is incontrovertibly the one that will purify the Parisian atmosphere, render rain less frequent and maintain at a distance the intolerable cloud that spits eternally in the face of an honest population.
Since Pharamond committed the enormous fault of founding a city on terrain always exposed to the overflow of the urn of the sad Hyades, it is necessary to think of doing our best to correct the topographical blunder of that royal industrialist, manufacturer of bucklers.
So, I am glad to return to the topic of those twelve imbrifuginous towers that ought to dissipate, without notice, assemblages of cloud over the city of Paris.
Artillery, like all poisons, caries within itself a mysterious remedy.
God would not have permitted gunpowder to be invented if it were only to serve eternally for the destruction of human beings.
The future of the world is the extinction of war; it is peace.
Great cities have their maladies, like individuals; rain is the greatest of urban scourges; it soaks edifices, undermines walls, pierces roofs and produces annoyance, rheumatism and damp. It pleases half a dozen theater directors, and that is all; it ruins all other public establishments. The Tivoli gardens disappeared after a summer of a hundred and fifty rainy days.
It is therefore necessary to master that scourge, as has been done for lightning; since Franklin has snatched lightning from the sky, eripuit coelo fulmen, one can send the rain back to the clouds; it is easier.
By consulting a collection of the Moniteur from the year 1792 one can see this sentence reproduced repeatedly, almost identically: “As soon as the cortege set off, the heavens, which until then had been pluvious, resumed their serenity, and the sun shone with all its brightness.”
The sun has illuminated the solemn entrance to Paris on horseback of all governments; the entrance of kings, of dictators, republic, provisional governments, quasi-legitimate monarchs, presidents and emperors. Is the sun glad to see such ceremonies and to give them all the same approval? Not in the least. That is all same to the sun.
The fact is that at the moment when equestrian governments enter Paris, a hundred cannon shots are fired, and the clouds take flight, like rioters.
Like it or not, the sun is then obliged to watch the cortege pass by, and cover it with radiance.
Now, imagine the effect of the imbrifuginous artillery when it operates, no longer in the flower-bed of the Invalides, but on towers a hundred meters high, firing on the clouds at point-blank range!
The Académie des Sciences excepted, does the result seem to anyone to be in doubt?
Let us imagine the worst-case scenario and suppose that those twelve towers never do work as umbrellas, that they have less efficacy than the cannons of Austerlitz, Moscow and the Invalides and that, in sum, they remain standing, in their monumental inutility, like the fortifications built by Louis Philippe around Paris.
Well, they can be given other purposes: first of all, that of serving as cyclopean candelabras for nocturnal suns of electric gas, and, if necessary, of announcing veridically, by the hand of an artillerist timekeeper, the four divisions of the hours to those worthy Parisians who spend half their lives asking what time it is.
Invalid watches and deceptive clocks would then find a sonorous corrective every fifteen minutes throughout the day.
Finally, if, as we imagine, those twelve towers do respond to the triple destination of chasing away the clouds, illuminating Paris and keeping time, the good people will have, there, before them, a continual amusement, less costly and just as exciting as the lottery.
That aerial warfare, the only one possible in a very near future, will be of ever-renewed and never-exhausted interest,
The people will not have to consult bulletins and telegraphic dispatches; they will read every battle on the great page of the sky.
In summer, the southerly wind, the generalissimo of the clouds, will lead its army, out of habitude, toward the frontiers of Paris. The tower of the tenth arrondissement will sound the alarm cannon, and the response will come all along the line, with the voices of Austerlitz.
It will always be very short, but always very decisive.
If the battle were prolonged, the people would waste too much time in the public squares and on the rooftops.
Why did Louis Philippe not employ to combat the ever-present rain a fraction of the millions consecrated circularly to combat enemies who never presented themselves?
The future, which always comes too late for the living, will see these things, and many others too, for the world is born, nowadays, of the union of steam and the railways. Everything that existed the day before yesterday no longer has any reason for being; the new order is already the antipodes of the old; the impossible will regenerate the world; interests are never disunited, they combine; Nelson fraternizes with d’Estaing, there is no longer any distance; wheels are wings, mountains corridors, ships bridges, oceans streams.
What, then, will come to pass after our generation?
It is permissible to suppose the incredible, to dream of the marvelous, to admit the infinite. Our fortunate children will recommence Genesis
Let us be our children!
19 A pavois is actually a kind of rectangular shield or buckler, although it was doubtless sometimes used to fend off raindrops rather than slings and arrows.
20 Campeachy is an American shrub from whose dark heartwood dark red and black dyes used to be extracted.
21 Literally “for a drink”—the conventional way of referring to a tip.
22 Silistra was an Ottoman fortified town besieged and bombarded by the Russians in 1854 during the Crimean War.
23 “longing for the further bank”—the quotation is from Virgil’s Aeneid.