Investigations of the Future Read online

  Now that God is comfortably lodged, let us occupy ourselves with the nation’s elected leader. We will establish on the Butte Montmartre, which will be broken up under enormous pressure and which, heaped up for that purpose, will serve admirably as filling-material for terraces and supportive structures. Glasshouses, orangeries, stables and other outbuildings will occupy the first step that pyramid of constructions, whose bottom layer will begin at the present location of the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. Terraces linked to one another by gentle slopes will support palaces and colonnades, from the center of which will spring other palaces, less vast, until one arrives at the summit of the edifice, at the mysterious and splendid sanctuary of the leader’s tower, a unique chamber lined with sheets of gold constellated with gems and ornamented—more expensively still—with the most beautiful paintings of the great masters.

  On the four faces of that tower, as many balconies will open, in the direction of the four cardinal points, from which the leader, clad in gold, diamonds and carbuncles, will be seen by the people in a wave of velvet and a beam of light. That leader, chosen by the nation, will be the most handsome, most intelligent and strongest man in the realm; so that, being superior to everyone else in all respects, hey will be obeyed passionately. Those wounded by his genius will be subjugated by his beauty; his height cannot be measured at less than eight feet. That Titanic stature he will combine with a form worthy of Antinous, Meleager and the most delicate conceptions of Greek art. A rational diet and transcendent hygiene will maintain him in an admirably youthful and healthy condition, and such an equilibrium of humors that his decisions cannot be other than impartial and judicious. His words will be collected and engraved in marble like oracles, and by night, scribes will keep vigil beside his bed in order to look out for the words that escape him in his sleep; for it is imperative that none of the leader’s thoughts are lost, every one of them being a benefit for the people and for humankind.

  When the leader descends into the city, it will be a splendid sight to see the ranks of the procession unfurling, from the summit of the palace to the base. The ecstatic population will watch that realization of its dreams of magnificence from rooftops and balconies; leaders must give the people they govern, under penalty of disaffection, the spectacle of the plastic forms of power. There is in the depths of every human being, no matter how poor or humble, a secret aspiration toward the enchantments of opulence. The love of gold, purple and marble torments all souls to a greater or lesser extent. It is, therefore, a sacred duty for the powerful and the rich to give the multitude the alms that do not impoverish in any way: the alms of the vision of their luxury.

  A thousand tympanists mounted on five hundred elephants—elephants will by then be perfectly adapted to the French climate—will open the procession, accentuating the rhythm of symphonies of brass instruments much more powerful than the bugle and the saxophone, executed by four thousand black men dressed in scarlet cloaks striped with gold or of blue striped with silver. Lines of magistrates, priests, scientists, poets and artists, dressed in severe or shiny costumes, will come next. Then the leader, in a sparkling chariot pulled by domesticated lions and tigers, horses of particular breeds that do not resemble any of ours, or by some animal of new invention, in copper, steel or some other substance; for minerals will then have been raised to the level of life by the efforts of science. Machines will be made that will reproduce themselves.

  The leader’s staff will follow thereafter: cup-bearers, pantlers, chamberlains, grooms, etc. If one is astonished not to see military men in the procession, it is because there will no longer have been any for a long time. War will be suppressed, with the vestiges of ancient barbarism; engines of destruction will have been found of such power that resistance would be impossible on either side. There has to be a certain correlation between offensive arms and the human body: some equilibrium beyond which courage no longer exists. Achilles, and Mars himself, would flee before an improved cannon firing sixty cannonballs a minute, each of two or three hundred pounds.

  The city will be possessed of an architectural magnificence of which no idea can be formed: without falling into the ennui of a stupid uniformity, the streets, conceived according to a rational plan, will each present a physiognomy and an ensemble; one street will affect the Byzantine style, another the Gothic style, a third the Moorish style, yet another that of the Renaissance. Greek and Roman architectures will also display their specimens. These curiosities will serve to vary the character of quarters built, in general, in a new style that we cannot yet design, but which, in all probability, will be akin to what the Spaniards call plateresco.14

  The architects of that time, instead of trying to dissimulate the parts of their constructions, will give them a great deal of relief and emphasis; they will draw ornamental motifs full of character and novelty from clearly-delineated roofs, windows, doors and beams. The façades will no longer be flat, like those of today; the cornices, the balconies and the main body of the building will permit reliefs prohibited now by a misguided administration.

  Large slabs of white marble or lava enameled in various colors, in such a way as to form mosaics, which will replace our horrible modern paving-stones. Streams of crystal-clear water will run in the gutters on either side; as for household wastes, they will run into two parallel sewers excavated beneath the houses, perpetually swept away by forceful currents.

  Double railway lines will run along the middle of the road, for barrows, carts, drays, fiacres, carriages and all such barbaric forms of transport will have been suppressed by the force of circumstance. Immense and numerous squares full of trees, flowers and fountains will absorb vapors, cleaning the air and distilling carbon dioxide; at every step, children, women, old people and dreamers will find places there to rest and stroll, and the least of the works of nature will take their place in the midst of the constructions of human genius, and will provide a reminder that there is a God—something that can easily be forgotten in the cities of the present day.

  In summer, canvas awnings striped with bright colors and sprinkled with scented water, will shelter passers-by from the sun; and in winter, vast panes of glass, posed between cornices, will protect them from the vicissitudes of the season. Streets that are too wide to be covered in this way will have arcades than can be closed by glass partitions.

  Every house will have an exterior outlet to its heating-system, in order that people can enjoy the mildest temperatures in closed passages, and head-colds and pneumonias can be avoided. In the opulent quarters, these corridors or cloisters—whatever one cares to call them—will be decorated with tapestries, orange-trees, magnolias, laurels, camellias and other flowering shrubs. This disposition will bring about significant modifications in costumes; the bright and pale colors, and the gold and silver embroideries that mud and rain deter will not take long to reappear. Our descendants will finally take off the mourning that all of Europe has long worn.

  There will only be four theaters—one for song and lyrical declamation; one for dance and picturesque spectacles; one for drama and tragedy; and one for comedy, pantomimes and exhilarating farces—but of an unprecedented beauty and magnificence, worthy of a people that claims to be the most intelligent in the world, but which presently goes to take its pleasure in pestilential hovels to which it would not send its convicts. They will all be large, airy and comfortable; the boxes will offer the comforts of the most refined apartments; one will be able to take perfumed baths in the bathrooms, while watching the performance through golden grilles; one will be able to eat there, pay visits and receive them in the forestage drawing-rooms, and one will enjoy those composite pleasures, so unfamiliar to us poor civilized folk, who can only proceed in enormous sessions.

  The stage will be lighted from above and not from below, as is stupidly contrived today; that amelioration will permit to achievement of optical effects of complete authenticity, and will modify the system of decoration in which so much talent is completely wasted. The mach
inery will be so simple and so perfect that a single engineer, stationed at a small keyboard, will be able to change the theater from top to bottom by pressing a copper button or flicking a switch. The staff will be innumerable; there will be a hundred lead singers, the worst of whom will be as good as Rubini,15 as many leading dancers, and so on. The chorus would, if necessary, be able to form an army.

  Stock exchanges, chambers of commerce, conversation halls, porticos for philosophical chitchat while strolling and Élysées for little children will all be disposed with an understanding of hygiene and wellbeing of which we have no idea, and which only poets could glimpse with the interior eye that they use to gaze upon the future.

  Thanks to studies in climate management, Paris will enjoy a temperature quite similar to Naples. A large zone of forests will encircle the city like a green girdle, to block winds and hold back fogs, which their foliage would absorb to return them to the earth, to be converted into springs and streams. When the weather threatens to be rainy, the detonations of monstrous artillery pieces, by means of the commotion caused in the atmosphere, will break up and disperse the banks of cloud; if that is not sufficient, aeronauts will go up into the region of the clouds in metallic balloons and, dragging the vapors into the turbulence of their wake, will tow them away to area of countryside that need water. The sky will be swept every morning as the streets of Paris are now swept.

  There will no longer be night; over every square will rise lighthouses, minarets of Moorish architecture whose summits will emit discharges of electric light so intensely bright that gaslight would be silhouetted in black against its flame. These lighthouses will project over the city a white and blue light ten times as bright as the brightest Oriental moonlight. One will be able to read the most microscopic print thereby five or six leagues away in the countryside. The only way that people will be able to recognize night is that they will be able to see more clearly then than by day. Gas lighting, today so noxious, will exhale the most delightful perfumes and the sweetest aromas.

  The people of that time will sleep very little; they will have no need to forget life in that intermittent death we call sleep; their existence will be so well-organized that they will never experience fatigue, the resistance of matter will be vanquished, and alimentation detached from all its grossness.

  If we wanted to, we could take our hypothesis much further and describe he mores of future Paris with as many details as a novelist of the intimate school of Monsieur Balzac would supply, but this is enough to prove to Parisians who flatter themselves that they have a capital how profound their error is. It will take them another thousand years merely to equal London, and God knows that we are not an anglomaniac!

  Arsène Houssaye: Future Paris

  (1856)

  One evening, I was one of ten skeptics gathered in the Café de Paris by one of our number, a miracle seeker—a modern Cazotte-Swedenborg—who wanted to tell us about one of his apocalypses.

  “Do you know,” he said to us, “where the transformations of Paris will end? Listen to me. I spent the night in the Place de la Concorde in the company of that eloquent sibyl, the moon. She told me a great deal about the future, while discreetly spreading her white light over the completed Louvre, on the Rue de Rivoli, which was approaching completion, and on the Champs-Élysées, which was just starting out. You won’t believe it, because you have the weakness of being strong minds. I read on the Obelisk an issue of a newspaper printed on Indian silk, textilis aër; it was the Moniteur de l’Empire universel for the first of May 3855.”

  The skeptics started to laugh, but the lunatic continued, in a firm tone: “Messieurs, I’m going to recite the Paris news to you, just as I read it.”

  And, as if he were reading the exceedingly universal Moniteur, he read:

  “The moment has come! The ordeal that the inhabitants of all the planets have been enduring has ended victoriously. Paris was yesterday, and will be for six years, the inn of all the living, the central nucleus of all the arts. On the seventh day of our Genesis we have the right to pause in confrontation with the monument of six days and to judge that it is good. On disembarking here the guests that come to us from Saturn and Mars will forget the horizons of their maternal planets. Paris is henceforth the metropolis of Creation!

  “Oh, if Monsieur Arago, the discoverer of two thousand years ago had witnessed yesterday’s celebrations, he would have been in danger of succumbing to his delirium. He would have shed his blood on the ground to convince himself that he was alive! The sea is pressing its enclosed and outdated waves in their most impetuous flow through bridges with immeasurable spans: the sea that is sad not to be licking with its thousand green-tinted tongues the palaces of the masters of matter; the sea whose first waves cradled the Herculean stranglers of monsters. The city is thirty leagues around; Versailles and Fontainebleau quarters lost among so many others, projecting over less peaceful arrondissements the refreshing scents of their twenty-centuries-old trees.

  “A few kilometers from the Rue de Rivoli, Sèvres, which has become the permanent market of the Chinese, our nationals since the war of 2850, displays its pagodas with their tinkling bells, in the midst of which the reconstructed ancient manufacture of porcelaine à la reine still exists.16

  “Where are you, once over-celebrated shade of Fontenay and Saint-Maur, Ville-d’Avray and Bellevue? Now, it is in the faubourgs that noisy industry agitates; it is there that the factories are where founders harden their submarine rails, and the delicate networks of steel that are the wings on which excursionists venture into all the currents of the atmosphere?

  “Where are you, Champs-Élysées, favorite theme of the novelists of the year 1855? Urban villas, circuses, sanctuaries of Polichinelle, where are you? In that alleyway, paved in concave iron, covered with roofs of crystal, the bees and hornets of finance are buzzing! The capitalists of the Great Bear are debating with the speculators of Mercury. Shares are being issued this very day in the debris of Venus, half-consumed by her own flames! What a conflict of Pactoluses,17 what a rattle of billions!

  “Where, then, was the so-called Palais Mazarin, the Institut, now in ruins, in which one of our fashionable hairdressers has established a wing-shop at the sign of the United World? Our Institut occupies all the space that extends from the Champ-de-Mars, that magnificent restaurant for our schoolchildren, to the Jardin des Plantes, prolonged as far as Sceaux. In that sacred path of our Académies, the Greek porticos lead to schools build on the models of Heidelberg, Florence, Benares and Peking! A cascade has sprung from the ground in the same place where the attempts was made to raise the heavy dome of the Panthéon, and the channeled waters of the cascade bear amorous students through perfumed squares where the mud of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau once asphyxiated rag-pickers and frightened philosophers.

  “When the emperor returns to the capital after a few weeks’ vacation in Australia, at the gallop of his fifty-horsepower carriage, from the city gate to his Louvre, he pauses under two thousand triumphant arches; he passes fifty colossi built in his image; ships with eighteen decks fire all their artillery on all the shores of our Ocean; the mirages of electricity eclipse the sun at midday, and that idolatry of the subjects for their sovereign consternates the last devotees, who remember that their idols never received such homage.

  “And now that the sky bathes with its perpetual radiance the city in which the great work is concluded, now that human beings, reconciled with God by virtue of the indefinite effort of their labor, can rest alongside the furrows that have borne all their fruits, and incessantly repeat a triumphant canticle of delight; now that within those walls of marble and gold, all the sensible scourges—disease, poverty and even death—have been vanquished by the indefatigable fighters; now that people scarcely remember the mythological epochs in which the world lived in hate; now that the discord of mind is tamed like the waves of the Ocean; now that women, mistresses of their own destiny, have forgotten the lie that once made them slaves and practice with a
resolute sincerity the immutable law of storm-free love; now that the energy of the living has obliged the dead to frequent the eternal fatherland of intelligence and surrender their secrets, too long buried; now that for Paris, capital of the universe, all is serenity, light and joy, who will dare to say “No!” to progress? Who will not mourn our ancestors in the nineteenth century, so deplorably deprived, so estranged from all the advantages that we enjoy by right of conquest, we the Parisians of the year 4000?

  “Who will dare to emit a doubt when, like the Pistheterne18 of the poet of the earliest times, humankind has espoused the handsome genius of sovereignty in front of dispossessed Jupiter? Who? Perhaps a few rhymers of fossil elegies, who no longer find in a place in that city, whose vulgar speech is a hymn, for their songs without echo. Who? A few amorous oldsters who, indifferent to the magnificent expansion of liberated hearts, blind to the multiplication of suns, regret pleurisies beneath balconies, the intoxication of supposedly-sweet tears and the rare joys of obscure sacrifice. But they are the buffoons of Paris metamorphosed! The exhibitors of yesterday have nothing to debate with its phantoms.”

  The prophet had finished. We went away silent and tormented—but after a few minutes, the least credulous of the group cried:

  “Messieurs, I demand to consult the Moniteur of the year six thousand!”

  And we began to laugh again.

  Note:

  The bulk of the supposed quotation from the future newspaper was reprinted by Houssaye in his Grand Revue. Paris et Saint-Pétersbourg in 1889, in connection with the centenary of the Revolution. The text of the first few paragraphs is identical, except that the date 1855 is changed to 1889, but after the paragraph ending with the word “homage” two new paragraphs were inserted. They read:

  “Out of the tomb of a poet named Victor Hugo, a little less well-known than Homer, his ancestor, an altar has been made for present and future poets, but there is doubt that the poet ever existed, just as Homer’s existence is doubted. A few pages have been found of La Légende des siècles, sublime pages that have escaped the fury of wars and revolutions. Critics argue as to whether it was Hugo who wrote the Méditations attributed to someone named Lamartine and the Nuits attributed to someone named Musset.