The Aerial Valley Read online

  The same study was common to those ancient nomadic people, such as the Chaldeans, who, living in peace with the entire earth, only sought to make conquests in the vast field of the stars.

  One can also remark that all the great astronomers have had the same peace and quietude: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and our Lalande. The latter, in spite of his opinion of creation, surely very immoral, was the best of men.

  The telescope that they used for observation was very imperfect. Since the time of its construction optics had made great progress. I offered them an excellent telescope that I carried with me on all my Aerial voyages. They accepted it with great pleasure; they were amazed by the new astronomical discoveries to which I introduced them.

  They were also occupied with the study of agriculture, and the part of botany that has for its object the knowledge of plants salutary in different maladies. That branch of medical knowledge, the only one that nature has indicated to the animals, and which suffices for them to ward off or cure their ills, also suffices for those people, who live a simple and frugal life exempt from any species of passion, only subject to maladies common to all beings that receive existence, and the seed of death therewith.

  Only the arts might have been capable of reconciling the inhabitants of the Aerial Valley with the earth. The kinds of art that had been transmitted to them by their ancestors were mostly as in the time of their invention. A few others had been discovered since. The improvement of the former and the invention of others excited their admiration.

  They showed me the watches of the founders of the colony, which had stopped a hundred and forty years ago,11 entirely broken down and without movement, and asked me whether we now had anything better. By way of reply I showed them the two that I carried; one of them was a Berthoud marine watch, the other a Breguet, a repeater indicating the day of the month, fitted with a second hand, etc.12

  The governor could not contain his joy at the sight of those precious effects; he immediately took them from my hands and suspended them in his room. He also appropriated my barometer, my thermometer, my compass and a few other instruments useful to my voyages. In acting thus he was only following the received custom of the Aerial Valley, where everything, in general, is common and no distinct property is recognized. However, my gaze, fixed with astonishment on his, recalled to his mind that our customs were very different from his; then he wanted to return everything to me, a little confused by his action, but I hastened to restore his tranquility by making him a present of them.

  The time for the evening meal having arrived, I sat down at table with the governor, his family and a few inhabitants of the Valley, who were all invited successively in their turn, unless some fault excluded them for a time from the chief’s table—and that punishment was the most sensible that could be inflicted.

  Fish, vegetables, dairy products and strawberries composed the supper. The dishes and other utensils of that kind were made of a clay very convenient for that usage, found in a gorge in one of the mountains. The beverage was a rather agreeable small beer. I had a few liqueurs in my nacelle but I carefully refrained from offering them; that is the sole wealth of our world that would have been a misfortune for that one. If their reason would not have been troubled by it for the moment, the privation of that tender beverage would at least have prepared for them a future of impotent regrets.

  Some time after the end of the supper, the air was filled with the most beautiful concert that I had ever heard in my life. It was the evening canticle, sung in chorus by all the inhabitants gathered together. A celestial modulation married the voices of the mountain men, naturally strong and harmonious, with the soft and fresh voices of their wives. An accident augmented the solemnity of the religious song even further; the evening had been stormy and the thunder rumbling in the distance came closer by degrees; it seemed to be the voice of the Divinity, applauding the homage of His beloved children.

  Nothing disposes one better to peaceful sleep than beautiful music. Before separating in order to enjoy it, we entertained ourselves for some time with the majestic storm that had provided such a beautiful bass to their concert. I told them that, thanks to new discoveries, that meteor was no longer redoubtable on our earth. They heard with a great deal of interest the history of the celebrated Franklin’s lightning conductors. That instrument would have been absolutely useless in their Valley, for it was unknown for lightning ever to cause the slightest damage there. All the phenomena of electricity, or galvanism, in general, and of physics, that I recounted to them captured their imagination and admiration no less vividly.

  My bed had been prepared in a room next to that of the governor. Music and songs appropriate to the birth of the day, as those of the evening were to its end, terminated my slumber agreeably. After having saluted the governor, I proposed a walk to him. The purity of the air, the calm of the sky and the perfume of the mountains inspired a mild serenity in all the senses. It seemed to me that I had been transported to the creation of the world, and into that place of delights where the course of time is only marked by the variety of pleasures.

  “Ah!” I exclaimed. “This is paradise!”

  “You’re right, my friend,” said the governor, “but the difference between our paradise and Adam’s is that vanity caused the first man to leave his, and it is to the wickedness of your forefathers that we owe the fortune encounter with ours. Here, our species has raised itself up again from its original fall. Here, it has recovered the advantages that it had lost, and of which you are deprived. We are in the first rank of beings for our happiness as well as our intelligence, while in your degenerate world you are only above the animals by your knowledge; they are less intelligent, but they are happier than you. A strange reversal produced by your passions! The noblest of creatures is the most unfortunate.”

  “Yes, that’s a certain fact. Our world has remained under the effect of the curse. The faculty of recalling the past and seeing into the future, which augments the happiness of the virtuous man, is the torture of the guilty. It would be better for him if he were limited, like an animal, to the enjoyment of the present. I thought once that the progress of civilization and enlightenment would contribute to the amelioration as well as the improvement of the human race. Experience and reflection have disillusioned me.”

  “My friend,” said the governor, “your opinion was just and you were wrong to change it. Enlightenment raises humans up and ignorance degrades them, but it is necessary for that effect that the enlightenment should be permanent and that the entire mass is penetrated by it. The inconstancy of your governments does not permit that stability. Today you have a king who protects literature and the sciences; he is replaced by another, who only has a passion for conquests; a third succeeds him, devoid of character, taste and ideas.

  “From that continual change a superficiality of mind results, incapable of piercing the truth. One takes instead of it a few seductive illusions, a few deceptive lights, which one follows and goes astray. Better the ignorance that remains in the same place—but let study be constantly followed, and let the torch of science always shine with the same light, and you will see the human species march with a slow but steady pace toward perfectibility. It is to that sole advantage that we owe what astonishes you.

  “All the intellectual faculties with which we are endowed have been constantly directed toward our happiness. It is to that sole objective that they ought to tend; such is the intention of nature in according them to us—and it is to render oneself unworthy of her favors to occupy one’s time with speculative studies that produce no useful fruit, even if one is assured of having the greatest success therein.”

  Everything that I saw announced to me that, indeed, the happiness of that people was not like ours, a rapid flash of lightning that shines and is almost immediately extinguished in the midst of dense and long darkness. There, it begins with life and only finishes with it. Work, far from interrupting it, is a new pleasure.

  That work, intermingled
with smiles, agreeable speech and joyful songs, is a living image of that which occupied our first forefathers in their magnificent garden, according to the beautiful description of Milton. It contributes similarly to savoring the voluptuousness of repose and the delights of a salubrious meal.

  Throughout the summer that meal is taken in the open air, on a carpet of flowers on the bank of a stream, in the shade of an avenue of linden trees that snakes alongside it across the meadow, and forms a bed of verdure parallel to that of the waters.

  The elders, tottering under the weight of the years, are carried by their children to the rustic banqueting-hall. They arrive in triumph, and everyone rises to their feet as they approach. The small quantity of wine that is harvested in the Valley is reserved for that last period of life, when the chilled blood has need of auxiliary warmth. The worthy elders rediscover in the beneficent liquor a few memories of their youth; they recall the old song that accompanied the dance of their time.

  When the meal is finished, other pleasures succeed that of the feast. All the people deliver themselves to the amusements that are most to their taste; some form dances whose steps are marked out by joy; others play various games, either of exercise or skill. In all those frolics, a decency reigns without study and without art. Virtues are so natural among the people that it would cost them more to detach themselves from it than it costs a corrupt people to practice it.

  It is thus that all the days of the inhabitants of the Aerial Valley go by. Enjoying a labor devoid of fatigue and a repose devoid of idleness, their felicity is far superior to that of the celebrated valley of Tempé, whose pastoral monotony must conceal many moments of ennui.

  I have said that all that good people lack is a knowledge of the sciences and arts of Europe. When the conversation turned to that subject, the governor observed to me that any novelty of that kind could only be communicated to his brothers after being submitted to examination and obtaining the approval of the council. In perusing the annals that he communicated to me, I saw that the law in question had been motivated by the extreme danger that the society had run in receiving into its midst a stranger named Renou and adopting some of his opinions.

  The governor was only animated by the desire to make his brethren happy, but, rendered circumspect by the example of the past, he asked me to tell him frankly what I thought myself about the result of our learned acquisitions.

  “Have your scientists,” he said to me, “improved any of the five human senses? Have they discovered and new enjoyment? In brief, have their endeavors augmented the portion of happiness measured for our species?”

  “Alas,” I replied, “of the three great discoveries made in the last two thousand years or so—to wit, the compass, gunpowder and printing—the first two have only served to depopulate the earth; only the third has enlightened it.

  “All the science of our astronomers has only, as yet, succeeded in making a good almanac; that of our physicists of knowing the relative weights of substances; that of our chemists of decomposing them. Beyond that, all is doubt and uncertainty.

  “Thus, the arts and sciences that are so vaunted attest to a very high degree of intelligence, but have been, in general, more harmful than useful. It is not the same in literature. Beautiful eloquence, sublime poetry, faithful depictions of history, touching reveries of the imagination, the great thoughts of philosophy, at least console our evils, if they do not prevent them. Our life is most often a path between two precipices; instead of wasting time filing in the abysses, is it not better to hide them from view by extending carpets of flowers to either side?”

  “In all times and all countries,” the governor said, “the culture of the sciences has preceded that of literature. Things go before words, and it is only after having thought that one can improve the art of explaining thought. It would appear to me quite astonishing, therefore, if the century following that of Louis XIV had not produced great litterateurs. I would be charmed to know them.”

  “The century of Louis XIV,” I replied, “has been followed not by the century of Louis XV but by the eighteenth century; for it is only great kings who give their name to their century, and that century will, in fact, be eternally celebrated by its litterateurs. Those who have principally honored it are four in number: Voltaire, Buffon, Montesquieu and J.-J. Rousseau.

  “The first was a tragic and epic poet, a historian, a moralist and a writer of romances; in brief he exercised all the strings of the lyre, and all in an original and interesting manner. However, he only appears in the second rank of epic poets when he is compared to Homer, Tasso or Milton; in tragedy when compared to Racine; in history if one reads him after Robertson;13 among moralists when one recalls Montaigne or La Bruyère; and he only occupies the first rank when it is a matter of ordering those of frivolous poets. But one thing that will always win him a large number of votes is his talent as an observer, in depicting mores, in grasping the consequences of historical events, and distributing therein an amiable and instructive philosophy. In all his writings, including the most frivolous, he interests by the art of furnishing a text with the chatter of men of the world and the meditations of thinkers. He seems by virtue of that the author of all Ages and all tastes.

  “Another writer has enriched with the most brilliant style the history he had made of all organic creatures. Humankind is the first link in the chain of those beings. The historian of nature covers all the species; he grasps with a sure hand, in the physiology of each one, the features that are common and those that are particular to them. What an admirable enchainment from the most intelligent animal to the one that seems only akin to an insensible pant! The genius of the great naturalist is deployed, above all, in the high station from which he contemplates nature. It is from there soaring above creation, that he unfurls the magnificent tableau before our eyes. Thus, the savant geographer, in raising his thought above the terrestrial globe, ceases to perceive the petty divisions of provinces and estates traced by the human hand, no longer seeing anything but the great masses of nature, the seas, the continents, the islands, the principal rivers, designs their lineaments and contours with exactitude, and encapsulates the entire earth in the circumference of his compass.

  “What Buffon did for natural history, another author has carried out for civil history. A new Oedipus, he has divined the enigma of the obscure and barbaric laws that once governed several great peoples. What patience, to examine their codes, buried under the dust of centuries! What sagacity, to penetrate through that rubble to discover the primitive disposition of the materials and the motive that directed them, to discern the parts of the edifice that were sagely ordered and those which sinned by some hidden vice, in order to render the faults of the fathers useful to the children, to draw the lessons of experience and instruct people in the science that touches them most intimately: that of living in society in the manner most appropriate for them to be happy!

  “That labor, on the principles that have governed the different nations, had been prepared by another, on those which have raised to the highest degree of elevation the sovereign people, and on the causes of its decadence. History is filled with individuals born on a throne or in the ranks of the vulgar who have made great conquests, but where can one find elsewhere than among the Romans an entire people conquering by means of a political system, constantly followed for more than ten centuries? The event is almost prodigious, and for nearly two thousand years one has only been able to admire it. Montesquieu cast a glance over that phenomenon, unique on earth; immediately, the prestige vanished; but the admiration perhaps only increased, in relating the effects to the simple and natural causes that his book has revealed. Thus, the construction of the church of St. Peter in Rome is less astonishing than the imagination of the architect who, in tracing the plan of that edifice, foresaw what it would be when it was finished.

  “Alongside those masters marches a man who combines the most profound knowledge of the human heart with the greatest talent for expressing the pas
sions. No one has equaled him in the depiction of love, of its voluptuousness, its storms, and the succession of its pains and pleasures. Endowed simultaneously with an exquisite sensibility, a strong conception and a fortunate facility in embracing several different subjects, from the smallest details of domestic life he has risen to the highest questions of politics and morality. Everything is embellished under his pen. His eloquence is seductive in itself; it sometimes draws him to sustain the most absurd paradoxes; he goes astray, without a doubt, and believes in good faith that the entire world, except him, is outside the path of truth. That prodigious magic of style won him a host of enthusiastic partisans at first, especially among women and young men, but gradually, sage people have dissipated a part of his charm. However, J.-J. Rousseau still retains a fine portion of glory. Education owes important reforms to him; and if no one was, with as much intelligence, more unhappy during his life and more castigated after his death, tender spouses and good mothers will hasten to console the ashes of their friend, and cover with flowers the tomb of the man who occupied himself with so much care to sowing them beneath the feet of their children.”

  “According to the picture you have given me of the great men of the eighteenth century,” the governor said, “I see that they have had one great advantage over those of the seventeenth. Style was formed when they were writing. They have made use of it to ornament science and render instruction agreeable. Undoubtedly they have only had admirers among you.”

  “The Pradons and Cottins did not have critics more bitter.14 A time will come when merit will be put in its place, and when sane men will render it a dazzling homage, but at the moment, the sages are silent; it is only stupidity that makes a noise.”

  “What cowardice!”

  “You’re too severe. Remember that we have barely emerged from a revolution that had struck all the pillars of society. Everything was broken or overturned at the same time. In politics, it is anarchy that has seized empire; in morality, crime; in literature, bad taste. Since the appearance of the man of Providence, everything is gradually returning to order; a just government has replaced the absence of laws, principles of honor have distinguished the citizen; common sense will have its turn; unreason and impudence will have to return to dust.”