The Napus, page 16
“Don’t talk like that—it makes my legs go weak. It seems that the Boche have undermined Paris, and that without the doctors of the Ristole it’d be even worse.”
“What do you mean, the doctors of the Ristole?”
But the person “in the know” did not reply.
“Hey, Julot, get hold of that vase on the right for me. Is it gold or imitation?”
“Oh la la! And the silver torch! It’s sad to think that it might rot without being able to do honor to anyone.”
The numerous busts with inscriptions that ornamented the graves, representing the deceased, were the object of the “gentlemen’s” jests, articulated in mocking tones in faubourgian accents that had certainly remained the same since Villon. But the worthy women scolded them, assuring them that nothing brought bad luck like “teasing” in cemeteries.
“It got to them, the bad luck, since they’re dead, and thrown all over the place into the bargain!”
“So far as the Boches are concerned, they’re men like us. If we were in their place, we’d do the same.”
I observed once again that in Paris, the pimps are both humanitarian and pretentious. Henriette, who appreciated the vigor of popular parlance, could have stayed there indefinitely—but a terrible reek, of the same order as that of the Chinese “footprints” began to emerge from the disturbed charnel-house. I glimpsed a series of epidemics that would provide work for cytologists.
Suddenly, a little click resounded, and one of the louts in the process of chatting and philosophizing over the skeletons disappeared. It was a fine case of aphanasia, occurring in an environment in which we had not yet had the opportunity to observe one.
“Well, la la!” said one of the mates, with a gesture of surprise.
“It’s the Napus, old chap—must be. Poor Milile, he surely didn’t expect that!”
“Au revoir, Milile—see you soon!”
“It’s still better than getting the chop!”
The man who made the last remark winked significantly. Had Mimile been in danger of “getting the chop”—which is to say, guillotined? I have a keen interest in etymology in all languages, by reason of my polyplasty, and I discussed it with Henriette, each of us forgetting the circumstances. The old women had disappeared, frightened. As for the pimps, they had manifestly got used to the Napus, as to everything inevitable. They’re the philosophers of the gutter.
We had taken the road to La Vilette, forgetting the absent committee of enquiry, when a coppery-black cloud of bizarre shape raced rapidly across the sky. What was that further devilry?
We had scarcely posed the question than a jet of warm water, with a reek of wet wool, hurled as if from a bucket, forced us to take refuge in the coaching-entrance of an old nineteenth-century building devoid of any kind of style. The name of the architect was still visible, however, and the date 1899. The avalanche had already ceased; it had not lasted five minutes—but it must have been repeated five times during the day, and ten times in every twenty-four hours during the days that followed.
It was unpleasant, but not terrible. Murmelthier, to whom that damp “Archimedes” was due, had boasted of being able to drown Paris beneath vertical jets a hundred times more powerful than those of American firemen’s hoses, which could flatten a man like a pancake. Kaninchen had added a toxic substance to the douche. The effect, as is evident, did not live up to their hopes.
Rapidly informed by their spies, however, of the feeble result of these assaults, the Boches adjusted their fire. That is an accurate description, for, without advancing their armies, whose dispositions we knew, they sent across the frontier flights of tiny bombs made of a new metal, at a rate—as we learned later—of five a minute. These bombs only exploded an hour after landing, releasing a murderous gas over a radius of ten meters. The gas in question was hilarifying, with the result that its victims died in veritable convulsions of laughter.
In fact, the explosions took place during flight more often than not, doubtless by reason of poor regulation, and we only received one bomb per quarter of an hour—which was quite sufficient. The newspaper reportage assured people that the hilarant death, with almost complete remains, was greatly preferable to aphanasia—a difficult choice to determine.
Afterwards, it was the turn of the artificial inundation, very efficiently executed, and which, if it was not very murderous by comparison with the Napus, caused considerable damage in a few rural areas and towns between Paris and Marseilles. It was clamed that the disturbance of rivers and streams was provoked by quakes extended along the watercourses and springs, and that they had been prepared long before. That is possible, but in spite of all our research, we never found out exactly how those Boche animals contrived to make the Seine, the Saône, the Rhône,the Durance, the Isère, etc, suddenly boil, as if they had been placed in a saucepan over an ardent fire.
The boiling was very brief; as soon as it overflowed the river returned to the lukewarm temperature of the artificial rain, spreading out in irresistible sheets, black in hue. It was, of course, undrinkable and, if swallowed, gave rise to the combined symptoms of ulceration of the stomach and goiter.
Two of the Aristotle’s Polyplasts heroically sacrificed themselves in order to study the progress of the infection and its lesions in themselves. I can still hear Cortenaz’s “Good, good, that’s all right,” when they announced their resolution and when someone came to inform him of their death.
Bizarrely, certain rivers refused, as was vulgarly said, but as Pascal would also have been able to say, to “play ball.” That was notably the case with the Loire, whose depth is admittedly feeble over a large part of its course, but which did not even reach the level of its historical and natural inundations. One wonders whether rivers, by virtue of being involved in the lives of river-dwellers, might not acquire a certain personality, like domestic animals and plants grown in a park, a farmyard or an inhabited area. In many grave circumstances, and twice during the old war of 1914, the Marne appeared to side with the land it waters, and played dirty tricks on the German.
At any rate, neither Blois, nor Amboise, nor Tours, nor Nantes was in the least threatened by the excellent Loire, which continued to flow, as if nothing had occurred, between its banks planted with the most beautiful and most varied species of trees. Admittedly, those same cities were subsequently watered, copiously, by all sorts of German projectiles, filled with the most varied substances, and decimated to the same extent as others by the Napus. Their good fortune was relative.
On the other hand, the Saône rose up like milk boiling over on three distinct occasions, corresponding to three pulses of the mysterious Boche Archimedes. None of the quarters of Lyons, except for Fouvières, was spared. The Lyonnais confronted that veritable disaster, from the viewpoint of damage inflicted, with the centuries-old phlegm that sets them apart from our other fellow citizens and finds its superior expression in the character of Chignol—the phlegm that I admired in my poor Mouillemouillard before he had fallen prey to suggestion and, as they say, “taken for a ride” by von Tschuppe.
With regard to the Rhône, I am convinced that Marseilles and the Provençals are not exaggerating in any fashion when they claim that German sorcery caused it to reverse its course furiously between Saint-Louis and Genève, like someone who, being very afraid of something in a southerly direction, flees northwards, making jokes as he runs. I believe it all the more because I subsequently discovered that the original plan of the Archimedes, already indicated in von Herzius’ book, involved the provocation of a reversal of flow in all the rivers and canals in France and Belgium. Here again, things had not worked out as the organizers had supposed they would proceed. If people succeeded in all the criminal enterprises they undertook against one another, the planet would have been depopulated long ago.
The anxiety into which these manifestations of German hatred and industry threw many people in France, England and Italy, was manifest in a singular and simultaneous fashion in many scientists, including the timid Cortenaz. He imagined that the Napus had started out as a Boche invention, an “Archimedes,” and that if the Boche had been afflicted by the new plague themselves, that was only to deflect suspicion. It was an absurd supposition, given the amplitude of the statistics of German aphanasia, but those who had formed it did not want to let go of it. In all laboratories, institutes and foundations there are flatterers who pretend to agree with a master’s whims in order to gain his favor. That happened at the Aristotle, and we caught one of our cleverest Polyplasts red-handed, coming to the directorial office to supply Cortenaz with false documents supporting his strange mania. “Put it there,” the latter said, with a radiant smile that was only slightly embarrassed.
Artificial hail, accompanied by noisy electric storms, only ravaged the départements of the south-west; I have no idea why. There were many attempts elsewhere, but it was along the Garonne, in the valley of the Adour, the Armagnac region, and on the coast as far as Bayonne, that that rural form of the Archimedes, designed to drive agriculturalists to despair, took its toll. The most painful effect, however, was the production of loud noises, projected over various parts of the territory, which could be heard for twenty kilometers around, as if an immense ammunition depot had blown up a mountain containing it.
That which afflicts and wounds the ear afflicts and wounds the mind with particular force, dissociating it into several painful shreds, each of which subsequently becomes an apprehension. The Germans knew that and, at the same time as they made use of silent artillery—which was, in consequence, very difficult, if not impossible, to locate—they produced rackets at will, in selected unusually sonorous locations ranging from drill-like hyperstridulation and screeching to the collapse of an iron monument in a giant bronze basin, which the eardrums could not resist.
When a din attains a certain volume, it is transmitted through the ground as through the air and water, as an echo. Everything is a pretext for it to resound and magnify itself. From the day when that odious procedure was first employed and chronometrically organized by our enemies, laboratory work in our Underground became impossible. Scarcely had an experiment or a measurement begun, a communication been transmitted or received, than the unprecedented, infernal tumult was unleashed, stripping one’s cerebral fibers and shredding the nerves all the way to the soles of the feet. It did no good to stick wads of mastic in one’s ears and keep them there; the savage din passed through the mastic and, vibrating between it and the shell of the ear, caused atrocious suffering.
One of our people then proposed a chemical composition with an atomic orientation such that sounds of any kind were deflected by the molecular architecture and transmitted away from the individuals coated with the remarkable substance. The first person who tried antinoise no. 110—after a hundred and nine fruitless laboratory trials—no longer perceived any fraction of the devastating bombardment. On the other hand, he was covered, a few hours later, by a multitude of blisters and pustules of a composition that defied analysis, and which caused death within twenty minutes. Everyone thought that the inventor had gone a little too far. The possibility of dismantling the Aristotle and transporting it to an isolated location, sheltered from German attacks, was then seriously envisaged.
What saved us was the knowledge that the Germans must have had of a further considerable emigration of Parisians of both sexes, weary of serving as guinea-pigs for the homicidal fantasies of the land beyond the Rhine. While French soldiers stood by with their arms at their feet, waiting to launch a counter-attack against a Boche offensive that never came, the population behind the lines, martyrized, flooded toward the Ocean and toward the Alps, thus preparing by means of habitat and the transformative mutual contact of children, a sturdy generation of montagnards and mariners. The mental and physical exchanges that are effective in the formative years, turning little town-dwellers into peasants and vice versa, combining hereditary powers beneficially and detrimentally, are in fact, one of the marvels of human nature.
Archimedism no longer knew where to find its victims. It was extremely expensive in all its forms. First, there was a relaxation, and then the cataclysmic era came to an end.
It is also necessary for me to call attention, as a psychological consequence of the Napus, to the exaggeration of the grief caused by absence. What makes absence “the greatest of evils” is that it evokes the image of death, but of a death that might cease. With the Napus, that image was combined with that of the inexplicable, the sudden and the definitive, which Edgar Poe has named so poignantly, the “nevermore.”
Whenever Henriette, delayed in a library or a laboratory, was late in joining me, I saw her aphanasicized, dissolved into an impalpable mist of shattered cells. The angor20 was so strong that I could no longer even succeed in reconstituting her delicate features by means of memory, and it was necessary for me to concentrate my thoughts to the extreme of fatigue and exhaustion in order for it to compensate me with a simple reverie.
La Renaudière convened a conference of military leaders, the professors of the Aristotle and the proprietors of the major newspapers. We were summoned to Underground 22, where the principal administrative services of the Ministries of National Defense were concentrated. Field-Marshal Mugh-Bigfort of the English army was there, Admiral Strummy, the Belgian General Mélevels, and a high-ranking American officer; for our part, there was Maréchal Verve, the conqueror of the previous Franco-German war; Général Levin, to whom we owed the hypersubterranean defenses of Franche-Comté, Lorraine and Alsace, a hundred meters deep; Amiral Duparc and the head of his general staff, whose name I don’t know; plus Cortenaz, Sidoine, Eustache and, finally, the four Anabaptists, Noirpelat, Tavejus, Tiqueton and Barouille.
Tea was served in abundance, with artificial jam, preserved muffins and wood-pulp bread, in consequence of the food-shortages brought about by the Archimedean cataclysms. I was impressed by the intellectual appearance of Admiral Strummy and his laconism. From time to time, like a metronome, he uttered a “Good,” or a “Right,” which made an echo to Cortenaz’s “Good, good, that’s all right.” Field-Marshal Mugh-Bigfort, powerful in his corpulence and meaty in the face, seemed rather drowsy.
Maréchal Verve had a bronzed and wrinkled face like a seasoned amber pipe, and spoke in curt sentences, interlacing and separating his fingers, with a great deal of penetration and optimism. Levin, with the pock-marked and creased face of a male Bellona, seemed a composite image of effort, struggle and success. From his thin and sinuous lips emerged a little voice, softness overlaid on hardness, like oil on trenchant steel. Amiral Duparc, in the twentieth-century of machines and machinery, displayed the cheerful rubicund face of a sea-dog of the times of Surcouf, like a sea-shanty, so much does the element mark the man, as the wind and stars mark the shepherd.
In the name of the King, La Renaudière explained the situation. At times I served as interpreter. Although triply menaced by the Napus, the German Archimedes and the war properly speaking, the allied nations were holding firm. Experience having proved that the best tactic was the counter-offensive, we were waiting at the first barrage, which was the Rhine, for the inevitable surge of the enemy armies. The cities of France and Belgium had been depopulated, of course; America had been virtually ruined by analgo; Japan had just suffered three consecutive earthquakes, which had nothing artificial about them. Aerial bombardments had laid waste to a considerable number of English, Belgian and French monuments. In the meantime, the German press had not breathed a word about the hostilities and reported the misdeeds of Murmelthier, Kaninchen and others briefly, under the various headings of occurrences, accidents and meteorological phenomena.
“That hypocrisy is the worst thing of all,” said the high-ranking American officer. “It requires public criticism.”
Levin indicated, with a slight sigh, that the moral pint of view was of scant relevance. He stated, in sober terms, that he was only waiting for the order to “come out of his hundred-meter holes” and tear apart the Boche armies, corrupted by the abuse of technology and reduced to the role of mere spectators in the midst of a thunder of inventions.
“All their noise disorganizes them more than us. Whatever sorceries might achieve in that direction, they’ll never triumph over military decision, which consists of striking hardest exactly where it’s necessary to strike.”
Maréchal Verve approved this forthright language—which Mugh-Bigfort and Strummy had difficulty following—with nods of the head. He possessed the exceptional qualities of a great soldier to a high degree, being visionary and quick to act, but he also had the military fault of bowing to civil authority, which permitted democracy to desolate France for such a long time. Bold on the battlefield and in purely technical discussion, he softened in the face of opposition by a Minister of War or the discontentment of a President of the Council. While he explained his arguments with a great deal of logic and force, he followed their effect on La Renaudière’s cold attentive face, like that of a chess-player. “Isn’t that so, Monsieur le Ministre? What do you think, Monsieur le Ministre?”
Levin’s attitude was quite different, as was that of the Belgian general Mélevels, honored with the fine title of Duc de Meuse for having victoriously defended that river, presently overflowing and uncrossable. Both regretted that the intensive bombardment of German cities by aircraft had not commenced immediately. Their criticisms, expressed in a moderate tone, were nevertheless expressive, and an atmosphere of anxious gravity surrounded us in the room, where the eternal drama was being staged of Fatherlands fighting for their independence, or for their preeminence, or—in many cases—for both at the same time.
“Messieurs,” said Le Renaudière, eventually, turning toward the newspaper proprietors, “you have your fingers on the pulse of public opinion on a daily basis—have you observed a weakening of the masses, a commencement of discouragement?”
Noirpelat and Tiqueton affirmed that they had, that people had already had enough, and were hoping for peace. Tavejus thought the opposite. Barouille, as throughout his career, had no personal opinion. Noirpelat and Tiqueton were rumored to have gambled on the analgo against the dollar—and, indirectly, against the franc. They spend their sad lives laying traps, denouncing one another, weaving and thwarting financial intrigues and plots. None of the four was capable of writing twenty lines in correct French. Each of them employed and controlled five Academicians.
