The Germans on Venus Read online

  “I replied ingeniously to Your Serene Highness that the two jesters were lying about it, and proved by demonstrative logic that the Celestial Tetrapod could not have emerged from a white egg, just as it could not have emerged from a red egg, since it was by nature viviparous, mammalian and anthropomorphic, neither more so nor less so than a buffoon; upon which Your Serene Highness hastened in his sovereign bounty to have the heads of the two jesters and all the chibicous cut off, to the great contentment of his people, who were impassioned with joy throughout the world.”

  “That memorable event was inscribed in letters of gold in the annals of my reign, with the decree by which I named you Chief Jester. I remembered right away, you see—but where the Devil did you get that viviparous, mammalian and anthropomorphic nonsense from?”

  “I knew it by abstraction, in my capacity as a qualified doctor of all infused doctrines and encyclical propagator of the perfect monopoly in omni re scibili11—but that story’s too long for it to be permissible for me to take up the precious leisure time of the great, the very great, the infinitely great Manifafa.”

  “Tell me your story, Berniquet. If it’s long and boring, so much the better. I only like stories that put me to sleep—but spare me at least half of your formulas of obsequiousness and respect; the fact that I am superior to you, poor dust beneath my feet, is too obvious to both of us for me to forget it. For fear of losing the habit, just call me Divine Manifafa from time to time. That’s much better, Berniquet—it’s short, it’s true, it’s clear; and when I’m smoking, with my legs comfortably extended on my divan, I don’t pay much attention to etiquette. Speak, Berniquet! Speak, jester!”

  “Your Majesty will be aware,” Berniquet continued, profoundly moved—as he should have been—by this gesture of benevolent familiarity, “that, 10,000 years ago, I lived in a sort of village, which was dirty, smelly, badly-built and disgraceful in every respect, erected on a part of the site that has since been occupied by the stables of your noble eunuchs, which was known as ‘Paris’ in the patois of that barbaric era. It did not hesitate to pass itself off as the queen of cities, even though it is scarcely mentioned in the ancient chronicles of the Empire of Hurlubière, whose incomparable capital of Hurlu shines today like a resplendent diamond in the world’s crown.”

  “I’ve heard talk of your shanty-town,” Manifafa put in, excitedly. “Stop there a moment, though. What’s this 10,000 years you’re talking about, with that clownish face that declares that you’re 45 at most? If you know the secret of prolonging for more than ten centuries the existence that the most vigorous of my immortal ancestors accomplished in less than 100 meager years, I’ll open my treasure and my harem to you on the spot, and I’ll have you set by my sacred side, buffoon as you are, on the throne of Manifafas. Tell me this instant, jester, if you know a means of living forever! I order you, on pain of death!”

  “No more than you, Divine Manifafa! We all die in our turn, ever since our miserable universe began rolling in its narrow orbit, and I have some reason to think that it will be thus until a new order emerges. I really am 45 years old, neither more nor less, as Your Highness has granted me with his special grace. And if he takes the trouble to subtract the months of nursing, the age of cutting teeth, whooping cough and spring-strings, time at college and the Sorbonne, the enormous portion of illnesses and sleep, the days of military service, the visits made and received, indigestions, missed meetings, lectures, concerts, literary conversations and the public meetings of 18 academies, he will easily comprehend, in his wisdom, that there remains to me a definitive quotient of one miserable year of life, just like everyone else. On my honor as Great Jester of Buffoons, I wish that lightning would strike me down, if I claim to have existed for one hour more. As for the 10,000 supplementary years that were mentioned just now, I leapt over them in the course of my biography. They lasted no longer, so far as I was concerned, than the time required for the heart to pass from systole to diastole, or a woman to change her mind.”

  “That’s nice,” said the Manifafa. “The length of your story is beginning to bore me very nicely, although I’m well accustomed to reading all the nonsense in Hurlubière to put myself to sleep. Go on then, jester!”

  In response to the Manifafa’s imperious and decisive gesture, the jester squatted on his heels and continued in these terms:

  “In Paris, about the year of grace 1933—which, I have the honor of relating to you, wasn’t yesterday—there was a universal propaganda of perfectibility to which I was party, by virtue of my polymathic, polytechnic and polyglot erudition, and which received licensed ambassadors on a daily basis from every rhumb of the horizon. The merchandise was somewhat mixed, according to taste, but all savants, in order that no one will understand them, have to be professional imps to some extent. On one foggy winter evening, however, before sharing out the takings, they agreed that it would be rather difficult to create a perfect society if a preliminary means could not be discovered to procure a perfect man, or to produce one, the aggregate always being, according to the apt expression of peripatetics—God bless them—the complex expression of the aggregated elements, as the Divine Manifafa understands a thousand times better than his humble slave, assuming that he is not yet asleep.”

  “May the Holy Bat shade me with his tenebrous wings in perpetuity,” cried Hurlubleu, “if I understood a single treacherous word of it! But take it upon yourself to spare me the peripatetics’ aggregate and get on with it!”

  “It was thus resolved that they would devote themselves incessantly to the search for the perfect man—which is to say that as soon as they found out where he might be, and having established that he was, they would make him the foundation of the universal propaganda and the regeneration of civilization.”

  “You were too modest,” the Manifafa put in, “for your propaganda and your civilization had no lack of them—foundations that is. You came out with that witticism willingly, although it wasn’t in very good taste. But what were you expecting of the perfect man, since you had already reached the supreme end-point of science, which consists of no longer understanding anything?”

  “Organic perfection!” Berniquet relied, humbly. “The complement of those innumerable faculties which God has distributed between his creatures so prodigally, but which he has restricted in our species with a malicious parsimony to the exercise of five obtuse and miserable senses, combining them, more maliciously still, with intellectual sensibility, which we only use to manufacture stupidities.”

  “We also use it,” the Manifafa said, “to say them and print them, damn it. These considerations must, indeed, have furnished the propaganda with ample food for thought.”

  “Softly, softly, milord! Propaganda never thinks that which it has thought before. There was a little Chinese peasant there that you could have passed through the eye of a needle, but who knew that it was as long as it was broad, and who swore to us that the perfect man had been manufactured by Zeretochthro-Schah12 nearly 4000 years previously, but no one had any idea of what had become of Zeretochthro-Schah or his automaton.”

  “I can’t give you any news of that. Who ever heard mention of an animal of that name?”

  “Zeretochthro-Schah, Divine Manifafa, was, as they say, si res parvas licet componere magnis,13 a sort of incongruous cross between a manifafa and a buffoon, who lived in the time of Gustaps and came from Media to indoctrinate Bactria. In addition to the Zend-Avestra and a few other books, it is generally believed that that he left behind a formula well-accommodated to the most vulgar intelligence for the confection of the great work of perfectibility, which is the perfect man; but, as his luggage was being transported, it was unfortunately flooded by a bottle of ink, and has never been seen since. No other means of obtaining cognizance of it, therefore, remained to the universal propaganda but to consult tradition, making a journey to the relevant places at the State’s expense. According to every indication, we would have obtained good results from that great enterprise if an
other manifest obstacle had not cropped up at the time—which was that Bactria was swallowed up by an earthquake between two of our meetings, taking Zeretochthro-Schah, his traditions and his formulae with it.”

  “Goodbye perfect man and perfectibility. I imagine that the nose of universal propaganda was put out of joint.”

  “I have already had the honor of telling Your Divine Highness that the impeccable propaganda never went back on its decisions. A dozen of us set forth, firmly resolved to search for the Bactrian all the way to the center of the Earth, into which frightful confusion, according to every indication, he must have descended by virtue of the law of gravity.”

  “You’re putting me on the track, wise jester. Did the reputation get there by artesian well?”

  “Your ever-august Majesty’s immense penetration is as sudden as genius, but we were not so ingeniously advised. It seemed appropriate to complete an exploration of the entire surface of the globe before visiting its entrails.”

  “Marvelous! I can see you now in a speedy conveyance, like the scientists of the common people. Propaganda on the high road!”

  “There was no means, sire. One could no longer travel without mortal peril, since the invention of railways.”

  “I had forgotten that. Continue then—for I’ve been making mental efforts for a whole quarter of an hour, which are waking me up.”

  “We embarked on the steamboat Progress—a fine vessel, I assure you—with three funnels and a powerful engine, which sailed so boldly, triple port, that my friend Jal14 would not have had time to count the knots on the log line. We traveled nearly 1800 leagues, at the stoker’s estimate, until we were reduced, for want of combustibles, to throwing our furniture, our tools, our petty possessions, and even our hydrographic charts, our scientific textbooks and our patents, into the boilers.”

  “You would have been wise to begin with those, jester,” said the Manifafa.

  “At first, that made a bright and brilliant fire, which filled our hearts with joy, all the more so because the guardian of the valves already thought he could see land through his achromatic telescope. The fanatic would have done better to attend to his valves however; the three steam-engines, which I had the advantage of mentioning before, profited from the occasion by exploding all at once, with such perfect harmony that one would have thought that they had given one another a password.”

  “The explosion of a steamboat—the capricious and jerky speed of which has discomfited me many times—necessitates the observation, Berniquet,” said the Manifafa, “that this mode of navigation is a furious demonstration of its inventor’s intelligence, and has a great deal of pleasure in it.”

  “When one has come back, milord. We were thrown so rapidly to an enormous height that I had not time to measure it with exactitude, because there is an essential lack of objects of comparison at sea. We soon perceived, however, in accomplishing our parabolic trajectory, in the manner of projectiles, that we had had the good fortune to be steered close to shore—without which death would have been inevitable. Undoubtedly, no country so delightful had ever presented itself to the gaze of an astonished traveler. Calypso’s isle, of which you have perhaps heard mention, was only a miserable sandbank by comparison, unworthy of the imagination of poets.

  As we drew closer, we were able to see developing before our eyes—and that figurative expression is quite exact in this instance, for we were falling head-first—all the marvels of an Elysian vegetation, crowned with flowers and fruits. There were none but orange-trees with golden apples, banana-trees with floating clusters, and vines with purple grapes, which linked their opulent arms with the branches of mulberry-bushes and elms; there were none but cherry-trees weighed down by the weight of a multitude of rubies, their flexible boughs swaying gently in the breeze; there were none but laurels with berries black as jet, or acacias with perfumed sprays, which mingled their intoxicating odors with those of violets, carnations, heliotropes and tuberoses, the fresh verdure of whose meadows was punctuated everywhere by streams of crystal and silver, like threads of elegant embroidery. Roses being relatively rare in the region, however, we did not notice any at first glance.”

  “I’m only astonished that you were able to notice so many things,” the Manifafa commented, “but I presume that you decided to make landfall after having tacked for as long as you say—let’s leave it at that.”

  “By hurtling from branch to branch, in the manner of Christopher Morin when he took the piau from the nest, Divine Manifafa. Our first concern was to count ourselves. Of the 800 individuals who had composed the crew only six of us remained, but thanks to the special effect of the providential wisdom that watches over the progress of humanity, all six of us were delegates of the élite of the universal propaganda.”

  “I have often heard it said, my friend, that people of that sort always land on their feet. But do me the honor of informing me whether the providential wisdom you mention had conserved the little Chinaman for you?”

  “The little Chinaman had done his bit, Sublime Highness; by virtue of his natural extreme slenderness, one may presume with considerable assurance that he had returned, in impalpable atoms, to the perpetual fire of creation.”

  “So much the better!” cried the Manifafa. “He was the one who got you involved, in this interminable story, with the pursuit of Zeretochthro-Schah, and I do not feel capable of forgiving him that in this lifetime.”

  “We were a little bruised; that’s the least one can expect when one falls from on high without preparation, but that only increased our pleasure in the midst of the happy people who were dancing in the shade. We hastened to join in their innocent games, as naively ass if we had been simple shepherds, and our cheerfulness increased considerably, as you can believe, when we learned that this pastoral festival was being held to celebrate the departure of a freight-balloon for a very distant region, to which it would take us in a little while.”

  “Did you know, savants as you were—and you being a particularly savant jester—where this balloon would take you?”

  “What does it matter where a balloon might take one when one does not know where one is going? That is the road taken by savants, empires and the world.”

  “Take ship for the skies, Berniquet! Go, my son, my jester, wherever the demon drives you! But an aerostat that one cannot steer is no more than a child’s toy, only good for amusing kings. Old women and academies.”

  “A mere bagatelle! The subtle perspicacity of your mind is still transporting you, increasingly extraordinary Manifafa, in advance of the discoveries of ancient civilization, as if you had divined them! The direction of balloons had become the simplest of all problems to solve, since steam-engines had been applied to navigation; the resistance of air-currents is less difficult to vanquish than that of the waters. We therefore climbed resolutely into the steam-balloon Well-Insured, which was an imposing vessel, perfectly equipped and armed for that great expedition because of the large number of aerial corsairs that had been ravaging the regions we were going to visit for some years, thus causing an immense prejudice against atmospheric travel, in spite of all the precautions of customs officers and the police. We were furnished with 24 good Siamese cannons, 52 feet long, and a 182 pounds of cannonballs, which could hit their targets at a range of seven leagues, and we had no less than 6000 fighting men, organized into troops armed with every possible weapon, save for cavalry and sappers, not counting the chiurm15 and the boarding parties, who were stationed at the grappling-irons—with the result that we took to the air, without anxiety and without difficulty, followed by the acclamations of the multitude.”

  “I recommend, jester, that you keep an eye on the valves! But how did you and your fellow savants pay for your passage? Were the propagandists of perfectibility stationed at the grappling-irons or at the chiurm?”

  “Eh?” Berniquet replied. “Set aside that needless concern, Divine Manifafa! In all the terrestrial, maritime and celestial conflagrations that you can possib
ly imagine, the first thing the savants of my time made sure of was to carry their purses with them everywhere, and the perfect consideration they enjoyed in that distant era procured them much credit everywhere the name of man was known. Their diplomacy was worth bars of gold.”

  “Might I permit myself to observe, Berinquet, that that is not the case today?”

  “I agree, milord. Whatever the circumstances, we were able to go nearly 4000 leagues16 without knowing exactly where we were, because Your Majesty is not unaware that the compass has drifted a few degrees since then, and at that height it can move randomly, turning entire circles at times, with no other motor than its own capricious oscillation, the attractive action of the pole being considerably altered in those elevated regions.”

  “That was a good opportunity to graduate the scale of the blueness of the sky, which gave so much trouble to Monsieur de Saussure!”17

  “The sky was as black as ink. However, we consoled ourselves in our isolation by giving names to the occasional clouds. It was a very ingenious pleasure, a human joy, gone with the wind like those of Earth. Besides, we would have run the risk of a serious accident if we had not escaped, by means of a skilful maneuver, the eruption of an accursed volcano, which almost put the Well-Insured up the spout.”

  “I can’t let that pass,” Hurlubleu interrupted, “and God knows that you’ve made me swallow a lot over the last hour. Never, and I mean never, has a volcanic eruption climbed so high!”