The Germans on Venus Read online

  “I beg Your Majesty to recall,” Berniquet riposted, “that I fell feet first into the rut.”

  “My word, that’s true, jester,” Hurlubleu replied, “and I’ve sometimes regretted it slightly, for if you had struck the bedrock with your head, I fancy that the story of your travels would already be over and done with.”

  “It’s only a matter of patience, Divine Manifafa, and we’re nearing the end, if you wouldn’t prefer that I start again. As I was leaning on the bar at the instant when it shattered, which is an entirely natural posture when one goes out to see the world, I had the good fortune to retain the side I was holding and to follow my flying cannonball, while Leviathan’s royal chair went to the Devil. Your Sublime Highness already knows the rest. I passed over the high wall of the palace and the tenfold circle of your guards, in which I made a nasty hole, as far as the small apartments, where I was carried quite naturally to your sacred knees—which seemed to cause you some slight surprise, in view of the rarity of the event.”

  The Manifafa was snoring like an organ. Berniquet concluded, logically, that he had gone to sleep.

  It is at this point that the jester’s adventures appear to come to a stop, but it was not the end of his troubles. This great man remained human, by virtue of a few weaknessness of organization for which no one had found the remedy in his time. Several times, while he was telling his tale, he had noticed a certain trembling of the silk screens whose light hangings closed the communicating door between the harem and the bedroom, and he had rightly attributed this to a moving body more intelligent than the external air, for it surely must have heard him talking. Astonished by the unaccustomed absence of their royal spouse, and perhaps also curious to make a more leisurely examination of the unknown philosopher who had passed so suddenly through their midst in the wake of the shafted cannonball, without having time to let them see him, the Manifafa’s wives had slipped furtively, one by one, to all the exits—and Berinquet even thought he had caught two or three glimpses of the crafty brown face of an odalisque, so barely mature that it impressed a singular preoccupation on his mind. This was the fortunate male’s favorite sultana.

  The hands of the clock had not marked out an entire quarter-hour when the Manifafa awoke with a start from some preposterous dream or other. One might perhaps have guessed that he did not find the jester nearby; on the other hand, he had scarcely passed the nearest screen when he found him extremely close to the favorite sultana, where the savant chief buffoon, surprised by a gentle and deceptive drowsiness, had yielded to the charms of a sleep similar to that of innocence.

  The unfortunate Berniquet reopened his eyes to the gleam of the yataghan.

  “Do you recognize the master of your body and your soul, detestable hypocrite?” cried Hurlubleu.

  “Mercy, have mercy on the body of your humble and devoted jester!” sobbed Berniquet, in a stifled voice. As for his soul, the philosopher had arranged that it would require no more preparation than the fleshy, sweet and edible tap-root of Brassica napus, which is the third variety of the Linnaean Asperifolia.32

  “This is a fine way for a spineless wretch to carry on, on the pretext of being a savant,” the Manifafa said. Sheathing his blade again, he continued: “That’s all right. Never let it be said that I deprived perfectibility of such a great hope merely to satisfy the vengeance of my mad jealousy. I can exploit you in a fashion more advantageous to my glory. I would gladly sent you on a shafted cannonball, on my behalf, to visit that honest Leviathan who said so many nice things about me, if I had the means—but you will give me great pleasure by returning, as soon as possible, to the quest for Zeretochthro-Schah by way of the bottomless well that has been newly opened up in the middle of Hurlu’s main square. I often thought about it during your story, and I am happy and proud to be able to offer you, within my own State, a favorable means of accomplishing your great destiny. Make an amicable will, therefore, in which you will take care to give me all that you possess, as our mutual friendship requires, and make ready, seductive jester, to depart for Bactria this evening. I am curious to know whether you will come back as easily from the nucleus of the Earth as from the most eccentric points of its rotation.”

  Berniquet, who was discreet, respectful and courteous, had not uttered a single word in reply to this paternal allocution. He was interred that evening.

  The jester of the buffoons was as fundamentally wise as one can be when one is a philosopher, and as good-natured as one can be when one is a philanthropist. Although he was quite obstinate in his systematic whims, his adventurous voyages and his negative longevity had disillusioned him somewhat with regard to indefinite improvement, and it was noticeable that he had often spoken of it lately with a muffled laugh. It is probable that he did not arrive at the grand vade in pace of Hurlu’s main square without inwardly desiring that he had never got involved with propaganda, Zeretochthro-Shah, Hurlubleu and the favorite sultana, but he put on a brave face—and the sensitive populace, who sometimes take account of powerful people who have come to harm when none has been done to them, accompanied him with the most energetic evidence of sympathy and regret of which common people are capable in cases of noble distress; they said nothing at all.

  The ceremony was pompous and magnificent. All the Hurlubierians were there—ten million individuals, not counting the women and little children. The jester, with a lantern attached to his doublet, a basket of provisions in his hand and a voluminous album under his arm—for his notes and drawings—took his place in the miner’s basket with all the dignity of an ambassador thoroughly convinced of the importance of his mission.

  “Irreparable man,” said the chibicou who was accompanying him at the moment of his leave-taking, “if our prayers for your return go unanswered for a long time, as seems only too likely, what information will you deign to leave us, in your infinite prudence, as to what we ought to think of the utility of science and the goal of wisdom?”

  “I should like to communicate to you all that I have learned in more than 10,000 yeas of existence,” replied the Curtius of perfectibility,33 “saving the rectification of my judgment by new discoveries. Science consists of forgetting what one thinks one knows, and wisdom is not worrying about it.”

  On that sentence, in which all human philosophy is summarized—and which is sufficient for me to conclude, insouciantly, my laborious pilgrimage through this vale of tears, the inexplicable Jehosaphat34 of the living—the activation of the cables sent Berniquet speeding into the bowels of the Earth.

  A week later, the watch-officer’s rope brought back a nice packet of geological rarities, the most curious of which was a fossil cockchafer which had eight legs and an inverted prothorax. The former jester informed his colleagues, by means of a missive attached to this subterranean gift, that the shaft widened out into an immense cone as it approached its utmost depths, which considerably increased the difficulties of a return journey, at least by means of ordinary ambulation, but that he was happy to write them a polite note informing tem of his determination to proceed to the central point of his excursion.

  After that, all the cables were withdrawn, and the philosophical shaft was covered over by an enormous monolith in the form of a millstone, in the style of those fabricated at Ferté-sous-Jouarre, between Meaux and Château-Thierry. A regiment of Patagons could not have lifted it.

  I regret now not having the pen of Tacitus—or a better one if you can imagine that—to describe the terrible events that followed Berniquet’s departure. His partisans, who naturally saw his unexpected and sudden message as a sort of covert exile, gradually roused the cruel civil emotions that subsequently gave way to the bloody war of the buffoons: THE WAR OF THE BUFFOONS which, you will remember as vividly as I do, furnished history with such beautiful pages, and over which the tragic muse has shed so many tears!

  The advantage lay at first with the august dynasty of Hurluberlu, but it soon turned in a calamitous fashion; that was the effect of a particularity too memorable
for me to pass over it here in silence, although the solemn dotard Attus Navius has not said a word about it in his chronicles. It appears that, as the etymology—which is the true luminary of facts—suggests,35 official congratulations in the court of Hurlubière really did consist of tickling carried to the extreme of reducing the conqueror to helpless spasms; it is generally believed that the magnanimous Hurlubleu quite this life during one of these glorious epilepsies. It must at least be admitted that critics will be hard pressed to prove the contrary, and I am all the more enthusiastic to accept this lesson because it furnishes me with a precious example of a king who dies laughing—which has probably never happened before, and will certainly never happen again, the way that monarchies are going.

  Hurlubleu having died childless, the kingdom’s Great Charter necessarily rendered power to the buffoons, who would have been quite content without it, in accordance with their immemorial habit—for one never saw anything emerge from any of that deplorable empire’s revolutions but buffoons: buffoons against buffoons; buffoons on top of buffoons; a whole host of buffoons. The people had plumped for white buffoons, red buffoons, buffoons of every color, buffoons with long robes and buffoons with short robes, buffoons in buskins and buffoons in boots, buffoons in togas and buffoons in armor, buffoons with pens and buffoons with swords, buffoons by birth, buffoons by chance, buffoons with money, buffoons with doctrines, buffoons of industry—but they were always buffoons. The wretched Hurlubierians, having something of the buffoon innate within them, always opted for buffoons and perennially devolved into buffoons. In the final analysis, who would vote for buffoons if he were not a buffoon?

  The sovereign buffoons, as is reasonable, erected a pedestal on the stone that closed the shaft into which Berniquet had descended: an unequal dodecahedron depicting the dozen continents of the known world. If ever a 13th were discovered, I sincerely declare that I don’t now where one could put it, but Heaven preserve me from such a great problem!

  Berniquet had left a popular legacy equivalent to the almost 300 sesterces that Caesar had left to each Roman citizen—which amounted, according to Monsieur Letronne,36 to 59 francs 61 centimes. That’s what I call a good prince! The poor jester, however, had not a single brass uncia sextula to dispose—and that, more than anything else in his life, inspired the profoundest pity in his biographers. On the largest face of the base, therefore, in a lapidary style not seen again in the Academy of Inscriptions, the last lines of his will were inscribed:

  May God Deign To Give To All My Good Friends,

  All The Patience Required To Tolerate Life With Love

  And Benevolence, To Render It Sweet And Useful,

  And The Gaiety Required To Laugh At It.

  A statue of the jester erected on the monument was inaugurated the following day, and, as the sculpture of that improved era was naïve and bourgeois, the skillful artist represented him in a nightcap and slippers, breaking wind.

  It is a beautiful piece.

  Louis Ulbach: The Story of a Naiad

  (1864)

  Louis Ulbach (1822-1889) was a protégé of Victor Hugo, who published a volume of verse, Gloriana (1944), before undertaking a career in journalism, as an enthusiastic supporter of Republicanism. Following the revolution of 1848, he founded the Propagateur de l’Aube [Propagator of the Dawn], in which he published a dialogue in the form of two series of letters, one signed “Jacques Souffrant, ouvrier” [Suffering Jack, workman] and the other with his own name. These letters caused something of a sensation, renewed when they were subsequently reprinted in book form, but they identified Ulbach as a potential trouble-maker when Louis-Napoléon staged his coup d’état in 1851; the Propagateur de l’Aube was suppressed and Ulbach went to work for the Revue de Paris, becoming its editor in 1853.

  In 1858, the Revue de Paris was suppressed in its turn by the Emperor’s censors, and Ulbach embarked upon a career as a feuilletonist, producing novels and short stories in considerable quantity, almost all of which are now completely forgotten. He also became the drama critic of Le Temps in 1861. In 1867, he started working for Le Figaro, in which he published a series of satirical letters above the signature Ferragus, which he used as a pseudonym on some of his fiction. He also became a significant contributor to the evolution of French Freemasonry. In 1868, Ulbach founded another periodical of his own, La Cloche, but it was quickly suppressed and Ulbach was jailed for six months. When he was released, he was unable to revive La Cloche, but he continued to express his opinions stridently.

  The fall of the Second Empire did not put an end to Ulbach’s troubles; indeed, he contrived to annoy both the Commune and the new Republic that succeeded it, and was imprisoned again in 1871-72. His argumentative tendencies had by now become legendary, although the controversy for which he is nowadays best remembered is a purely literary one; following the publication of Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867), Ulbach published a fierce denunciation of that novel under the title “La Littérature putride” [Putrid Literature], to which its equally combative target responded with a fervent diatribe that became the “manifesto” of Naturalism. From 1878 until he was forced by ill-health to retire, Ulbach completed his career, as Charles Nodier had done before him, as the librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal.

  “Histoïre d’une Naiad” was reprinted in book form in Voyage autour mon clocher: histoire et histories (1864), but was presumably published in a periodical some time before that date. It might seem a peculiar inclusion in a collection of this sort, given that, with the exception of a couple of underdeveloped asides, it is not speculative, and is not even fiction. It is, however, an early technological romance of a sort that was subsequently to become commonplace in the context of the popularization of science. Ardent champions of progress never found it easy to express their enthusiasm in the form of futuristic fiction, but they found it much easier in essays celebrating the past achievements of technological innovators. By the mid-20th century, popularizers like Isaac Asimov and Martin Gardner—both of whom also dabbled in science fiction—had perfected a kind of “science non-fiction story” used to turn accounts of scientific, mathematical and technological discoveries into heroic fantasies, gradually building a new “factual mythology” that has become the main narrative component of the history of science.

  Most “human interest stories” of this kind foreground ingenious inventors rather than their inventions, but some fetishize and mythologize the machines themselves, and Ulbach’s essay in tragic drama is one of the earliest accounts of this sort. It makes an interesting contrast with more orthodox literary accounts of potential technologies, which far more readily fall prey to the effects of the Frankenstein complex, and its careful reflective reference to another (even more obscure) literary work featuring its doomed heroine provides a deft reminder of the fact that technology, like art, is a form of “secondary creation.”

  It is a beautiful spectacle to see Louis XIV, young, magnetically attractive and replete with all the prestige of nature and power, progressing with smiling majesty towards the realization of one of his Olympian fantasies. I do not seek to hide the fact that the pompous scaffolding in question was founded in sweat and tears; I know perfectly well that all that wealth had a heavy counterweight in the misery of the common people; I know perfectly well that the construction of the palace of Versailles might have cost the lives of an army; but why reproach the sacrifices made to ambition more bitterly than those made to art and science? Hecatomb for hecatomb, I prefer those that are immolated to genius to stupid massacres for reasons of State. Is it less honorable to die for a masterpiece than to avenge the human vanity of a statesman or repair the ineptitude of an imprudent ambassador?

  We shall not review all the titanic playthings with which Louis XIV capriciously amused himself; we shall not read through that epic poem hewn in stone—the only true epic of which France can be proud; we shall proceed bucolically through the laughing woods and hillocks to talk about the naiad whose powerful conch e
xhaled water into the fountains of Versailles, and previously exhaled it from the stone noses of horses at Marly—which means, shorn of hyperbole, that we shall visit the hydraulic machine whose aqueduct, with its enormous arches, mingles so picturesquely with the landscape of Bougival, and recalls, in setting aside the verdure, one of those horizons set in the depths of the Italian landscape around Tivoli.

  If we were still in that eminently artistic epoch in which art replaced natural ornaments in the mind, in which artificial hairpieces maintained the inspiration of poets in mild warmth, and in which illusion—of which frequent use was made—created belief in the operatic mythology enthroned everywhere, this would be a mater of intoning a ode or epistle in the manner of a description of the Rhine. Under what periphrases the workings of the machine could be dissimulated! How reeds might be dressed and weeds crowned! How little tritons and dolphins might be made to swim and leap in the silvery moss scattered in that river region!

  Unfortunately—or, rather, fortunately—the abuse of hydraulics has engendered skepticism with regard to naiads, and steam, applied to the Marly machine, moves so brutally that it only seems to us that the poor nymph must be suffering a horrible dismemberment. There would be little chance of waking her up or invoking her. Nor do we wish to issue a technical description, and we have excellent reasons for that, which require the dispossession of one alderman in order to give to the others. We are in perfect ignorance with regard to hydrostatics; we shall simply relate what we know; we shall forge the legend of the machine; we shall visit her in this story as we have visited her in reality, by way of fantasy, without industrial preoccupation or pedantic afterthought, restricting the point of view…to the point of view.

  I have often wondered what might have happened if Louis XIV had had steam-engines, railways and gas at his disposal. I do not doubt that these inventions would have been exploited marvelously, and that the hydraulic enchantments glimpsed periodically would have been unable to perpetuate themselves and last the night. Imagine the grounds of Versailles illuminated in the regal fashion in which everything was done then; imagine that the light employed had the same range as a lighthouse: what a dream! Unhappily, they had nothing but water at their disposal—but they did not hesitate to use it and get as much out of it as possible.