On the Brink of the World's End Page 6

  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.

  Charles Epheyre: Sister Marthe

  (1899)

  I

  On returning home that evening, at five o’clock, Laurent Verdine found a telegram thus conceived: My grandmother dead at the Château de Plancheuille. Come. George Olivier.

  Immediately, Laurent went to consult a railway timetable. Plancheuille is a few kilometers from Moulins. By leaving Paris that evening, he could arrive there in the morning.

  He did not hesitate for a moment. Was he not George’s best friend, his only friend? So, without losing a minute, he got ready to leave. Three or four books, a few clothes, a good blanket, the final instructions to the old maidservant who served as his housekeeper, and that was it: en route. Here he is in the carriage.

  George de Plancheuille! Yes, certainly, he is his best friend.

  And he remembered the great voyage they had made together, eight years ago already, across the Atlantic, into the immense Brazilian forests, from Rio to the Cordilleras, through perils and emotions of all kinds.

  Since school, their amity had been very tender. Laurent Verdine, the son of a petty provincial physician, and George, the son of General Olivier de Plancheuille, conceived for one another, at the beginning of life, one of those profound and precocious sympathies that lasts a lifetime and resists all storms. One day, not long after receiving their baccalaureates, they had left together for America.

  For that sudden impulse, Laurent was criticized by everyone, but he was recalcitrant to all discipline. He dared to adopt insouciance as a principle, and he had the enormous and unforgivable audacity to think for himself. Now, in order to succeed it is necessary to pay much less heed to one’s own opinion than those of others. Laurent was, in consequence, an eccentric, and he would have merited being punished for his escapade.


  He was not punished, though. Far from it. Having returned to France he had quickly acquired one of the first ranks among the students, his contemporaries. A hospital intern, and now a doctor. How time flies! A doctor already. But that is only a first step; there are other grades to conquer. Above all, before him, a world of facts, all mysterious, all interesting, to investigate and analyze.

  And Laurent sensed himself gripped by a kind of amorous passion for his art, uncommon in our skeptical and positive era.

  At full steam, the train took Laurent far from Paris. He saw filing past, by the fantastic light of the moon, fields, rivers, bridges, hills, long roads planted with trees, villages with their small houses and thatched cottages; and while looking at them, Laurent recalled the events that had traversed his life, almost as fleetingly as those passing silhouettes: his voyage, his endeavors, his friendships, his amours. He stirred in his mind the adventurous studies he had undertaken of the strange forms of human intelligence, that mystery of mysteries; and he felt himself attracted, and simultaneously frightened, but those extraordinary depths, bottomless abysms where everything is unknown. He mingled the past and the future, hopes and regrets. Where would his curiosity end? In other worlds, perhaps...

  He woke up at Moulins.

  Still half asleep, he gets down from the carriage and, in the courtyard of the station, hails a carriage hitched to two small, vigorous horses; and, briskly, at a crack of the whip that envelops them, the two small hoses go through the town.

  Now Laurent is no longer dreaming about magnetism and medicine; he is thinking about the people he will find at Plancheuille: his friend George; the old grandmother who has just died, George’s father, General Olivier de Plancheuille, the simplest and most honest of men.

  In spite of everything, he will not remain long in that family in mourning. What endeavors await him! In two days for sure, Laurent will return to Paris.

  II

  At the Château de Plancheuille, the first person Laurent saw was his friend George, who embraced him tenderly, with tears in his eyes.

  “Poor grandmother,” he said. “She died every peacefully. At her age, death has no shock. How good you are to have come. But you’re going to stay here for a few days; you’ll keep my father company—he’s very sad. And I’ll introduce you to my wife; you saw her on our wedding day, a few months ago, but since then…but I’ll take you to your room first.”

  Laurent’s room was on the ground floor. A glazed door illuminated it, from which one could go directly into the park. Close by, slightly to the rear, was a chapel that seemed to be attached to the château. A path planted with linden trees departed from the chapel to end at a small gate. Beyond that gate the village commenced: an assemblage of houses, whose thatch-covered pitched roofs Laurent could make out.

  A few moments later, in the drawing room, the General shook Laurent’s hand forcefully, as if he wanted to break it.

  “Thank you, my dear Laurent, thank you! Oh, we’re suffering a cruel ordeal. We’ve seen many things, we old ones. I’ve seen my wife die…I’ve seen Sedan…I’ve seen many other horrors too. Well, the death of my poor old mother has moved me more than all the rest. Once again, thank you, for George and myself.”

  The funeral ceremony was to take place the following day. Laurent told himself that he would leave thereafter, but he had a long day to spend at Plancheuille. How should he employ it that interminable day?

  To remove himself from the heavy atmosphere of a mortuary house, he set out alone, wandering through the park and its surrounding area. He walked in that fashion all day, following the meanders of the stream that snaked through the meadows.

  Although he was a Parisian, and a skeptic, Laurent was something of a poet. Every generous spirit has a particle of poetry vibrating within it. That beautiful September day inflated his heart with a sort of vague tenderness for things and for people.

  Perhaps happiness is here. Why struggle and strive, battle back there in Paris, lost in that whirlwind of hatreds jealousies and rivalries? Why not live here, in the bosom of this beneficent nature? Here, one can love people freely, without worrying about their ambitions and their disputes. One loves them all the more because one is further away from them.

  When he returned to the château, a little fatigued, the sun had just set. It seemed that the horizon was ablaze with an immense and magnificent conflagration, a grandiose spectacle that Laurent contemplated amorously for a long time. But the shadows fell rapidly, and the contours of the trees, the chapel and the village were lost in the increasing gloom.

  Suddenly, in the midst of the silence, Laurent heard the sounds of an organ vibrating nearby. Laurent recognized Gounod’s Ave Maria. The melodious and pure song, which resounded in the shadow and silence of the dusk, was powerfully harmonious. Laurent listened delightedly.

  Who can play the organ here at Plancheuille, he thought. Doubtless it’s George’s wife.

  Fundamentally, however, he did not care about knowing the name of the organist. He abandoned himself to the charm of the delightful music, and, leaning on the window-sill, breathed in all the scents of the autumn, drawing life and youth into his lungs, allowing his emotion to increase.

  The Ave Maria concluded. Laurent heard the door of the chapel close. He leaned out in order to see who came out, but he only saw a shadow gliding through the trees of the pathway. Then, everything returned to silence. So it was not George’s wife. Who, then?

  That evening, at supper, in the main hall of the château, he made the acquaintance of a new guest, the village curé. Abbé Lenègre, a slightly rustic individual, but paternal and acute.

  A fine type specimen of the country curé! George thought.

  During the dinner, he had a desire to ask the name of the man or woman he had head playing the organ so well, but a kind of false shame restrained him. He was afraid of revealing the extent to which he had been moved. Sometimes, one has a modesty regarding one’s emotions; one hides them as if one ought to blush at them.

  The General and his son, anxious to render their hospitality amiable, sought to make their guest forget the sad duty that he had come to accomplish. They chatted cordially, with simplicity, but they separated at an early hour.

  “Will you permit me to walk back to the presbytery with you?” Laurent said to the old priest.

  “Oh, the presbytery isn’t far, but I’ll accept, in order to have the pleasure of chatting with you for a few minutes more.”

  After leaving the château, they went past the chapel. Laurent could not help asking: “Is that your church, Monsieur le Curé?”

  “Yes,” the man said, “that’s my church. The old one burned down twenty years ago; it was the General who had this one built, until we’re given a veritable parish church. We’ve been waiting for twenty years, without yet being able to find the necessary funds. We are, alas, living in impious times…and doubtless you yourself…”

  “No, Monsieur,” said Laurent, smiling. “Not as much as you suppose. The sentiments of poor physicians are greatly calumniated. Truly, we’re able to respect people everywhere they’re found. And then, how can one not be moved when one sees, as in the de Plancheuille family, the patriarchal traditions of old revived? In fact, since we’re talking about the chapel, I heard the sounds of an organ there before dinner. You have an organ and an organist, then? A talented organist, in fact!”

  “Oh, you noticed…,” said the curé. “It was doubtless Sister Marthe.”

  “Sister Marthe?”

  “Yes, one of our nuns. I say nun, although she’s only a novice as yet—but she’s going to make her vows in a few weeks. She does have talent, doesn’t she?”

  “A great deal of talent, Monsieur le Curé. I can say that to you with some knowledge of the case, because, such as you see me and although you take me for an impious individual, I can play the organ. It would take too long to tell you by what series of hazards I was provided with that talent to please, but in sum, as well as I can, I too play the orga
n. Well, truly, Sister Marthe has a great deal of talent. So you have a convent here?”

  “A convent, certainly not, but a school. We owe that to the General too. The school is maintained by the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul—this is their domicile, here.”

  Laurent and the curé had passed through the gate that terminated the park and were passing a large white house, on the roof of which was a cross that was outlined in black against the starry sky.

  “Well, my young friend, that Sister Marthe who comes every evening to play in the chapel is very ill, poor child, and even…by what stupidity, unworthy of my age, have I not thought of talking to you about her? You must examine her—you might perhaps have some good medical advice to give her. Yes, that’s right! Come to collect me at the presbytery tomorrow morning, before the ceremony, at eight o’clock. I’ll bring you here, to the sisters’ house. You’ll see Sister Marthe, and you’ll be able to tell us whether anything can be done to save her.”

  “She’s consumptive I assume?”

  “Consumptive? Alas I fear so. That’s a great sadness for us, because Sister Marthe is one of our most valiant nuns. It requires great courage, young man, to get the alphabet into the reluctant heads of our little montagnards. Well, Sister Marthe spends her day in that ingrate task. When she has a free moment, in the evening, after class, she goes to play the organ in the chapel. In any case, at tomorrow’s sad ceremony, you’ll hear her young pupils, and you’ll observe that they have good voices and can sing in tune. Oh, my dear doctor, if you could save Sister Marthe, you would be doing a very good deed!”

  “We can do very little, alas, but I promise you that I shall do my best. Tell me, Monsieur le Curé, how did she learn to play the organ? Is it you who gave her lessons?”