The Napus, page 3
Indeed, forty-eight hours after Sidoine’s exceedingly reasonable observations, as if by a sort of irony, it was at the Aristotle Foundation itself that a further disappearance by Napus occurred, in circumstances that would not have left St. Thomas himself any room for doubt.
One of the luminaries of our establishment, who had contributed a great deal, fifteen years before to the since-overtaken theory of cyton, was Madame Grégeois, the divorcee of the late Professor Grégeois precisely because of their disagreements on the subject of the magnetic centers of the cell. The husband claimed that they were two in number, the wife that they were three, neither having anticipated the fourth center discovered by the lovely Tastepain. Madame Grégeois was ugly, shrewish, peremptory and interfering, and had been decorated with every possible award of every nation of the inhabited earth, which formed an impressive multicolored display on her semi-masculine costume at official receptions. She detested Tastepain, of course, not only because of the cyton but also because of her charming physique.
Now, the supreme council of the Aristotle Foundation having met urgently, we—a few Polyplasts, Professor Ailette, Grégeois-la-Grège,5 as we called her in jest, and half a dozen other leading lights—were in Sidoine’s laboratory. The harpy was in the process of expounding her opinion on the probable origin of the Napus, which was attributable, according to her, to the spots of Jupiter acting of their own accord on sunspots and rendering them cytocidal, fatal to human cells. Suddenly, the little dry click that had remained in my ears since the old man of the Champs-Élysées was heard, and nothing more remained of Grégeois-la-Grège than the memory of her slanders, her ugliness and her genius.
The professors went as pale as effigies of fresh plaster. We Polyplasts, of harder composite formation, had difficulty holding back the convulsive laughter I mentioned before. Ailette was already twitching his goatee under the triple bony projections of his cheekbones and forehead, commencing the funeral oration of our vanished colleague. The habit he had of making speeches over graves and commemorative monuments caused him to dive right in, listing in his wooden voice the merits and achievements of the unfortunate Grégeois, thus returned to the impalpable ether after having sustained the cause of the triple magnetic center of the cell all her life. He even went so far as to classify the annihilated—“our great annihilated”—among the scientific martyrs of the twenty-third century, which was exaggerated. A pickpocket, a doorman or an ambulant seller of chestnuts or dates could just as easily be subject to the Napus as the King of France or the President of the Britannic Republic.
I ought to add, in order to maintain the historical veridity that is the greatest attraction of memoirs, that the disappearance of that Megaera of the laboratory caused general delight at the Foundation. Mouillemouillard, whom she harassed and even slapped on occasion, if he had mislaid a retort, trembled with joy. He never ceased repeating: “What a blessing, Lord Jesus, what a stroke of luck, damn it!” As for Henriette Tastepain, she could hardly believe in such good fortune, and it was necessary to show her, through a doorway, the grave and contorted face of Ailette the speech-maker to convince her of the napusification of her enemy.
The news media and technical press generally lag behind, the former by ten years and the latter by ten months, with regard to the true status and scientific value of personalities who die, with or without leaving mortal remains. Thus, fifty years after the microbial doctrine had been abandoned by the institutes, the Academicians and even the Universities of America and France—the two nations most attached to their scientific fetishes—and the great dailies contained to entertain their readers with the bacilli of typhoid, tuberculosis and syphilis, and other phantoms and fancies of a similar stripe. For a week, the concept of cyton and its derivatives alimented the necrology of the “excellent Grégeois,” universally missed and mourned, especially in the glorious establishment where she and her illustrious husband “had brought it to the perfection in which it is seen today.”
These well-informed publications were sure that the study of the new plague would be taken to the extreme by the scientific personnel of the foundation, and that it would be mastered before long. It was decided that a national subscription would be opened for the erection of a statue to the Grégeois household, so perfectly disunited, in the central courtyard of the dwelling that they had made to resound, for many years, with the din of their learned conjugal disputes.
In the following week, however, ten cases of Napus were duly observed in Paris and its suburbs, five in Lyon, twenty in Marseilles, seventeen in Lille and three in Nancy. It was thought that rural areas might be spared, until three aphanasias of classic form appeared in Nièvre, five in Brittany, and twenty-two—a frightful figure—in Auvergne, around Clermont-Ferrand and Brioude. At the same time, England, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Sweden appeared to be afflicted even more rudely, with figures whose mounting progression sent shivers down the back. The little dry click, the announcer of the disappearance, was perceived everywhere. Some witnesses of the fatal phenomenon thought they had perceived a smell of burning, similar to the one our distant ancestors attributed to the arrival and departure of the Devil.
Once the initial moment of stupor—and, for us Polyplasts, of merriment—had passed, a great activity was manifest in all the institutes, academies, universities and scientific foundations in the world, in the form of correspondence, communications, discussions and controversies regarding the origin of the unprecedented plague. Human intelligence, much more restricted than is generally affirmed, even in the most elevated and penetrating minds, has a tendency to imagine, for such a phenomenon, some unique cause, and only admits a multiplicity of cases with difficulty. The explanation of the damned Grégeois by reference to the Jovian spots left the world along with its enunciator, but the following theses were successively envisaged:
Firstly, the liberation of an unknown force, which enthusiasts for the defunct cyton did not fail to suppose to be the issue of the human cell itself, in certain atmospheric and meteorological conditions as yet unsuspected. Professor Ailette rallied to this supposition and devoted a three-hundred-page volume to it, with diagrams, which he naturally had one of his pupils write, who delegated it himself to a laboratory assistant—hence the extremely vague character of the work, which was immediately crowned by the Académie des Sciences and rewarded with a prize of fifty thousand francs, of which the laboratory assistant received a hundred, the pupil five hundred and Ailette the rest. He had considerable expenses to meet, maintaining, in spite of his advanced age and being as ugly as sin, a nineteen-year-old dancer.
Secondly, partial electrical discharges, veritable lightning-bolts of prodigious amplitude, due to the abuse of waves of every sort, which are running around the planet in all directions at all hours of the day and night. Professor Sidoine became the champion of this ingenious, even plausible idea, to which he soon attributed a character of certainty and evidence such that he flew into a rage if the slightest doubt were emitted on the subject of what he called his “doctrine.” The aforesaid doctrine was soon to have terrible consequences, in the form of clashes between the nations of Europe, America, Africa, and Australia, which had reached different levels of electrical sophistication and exploitation.
Thirdly, a slow and clandestine wastage of the tissues—a cancer without cancer—provoked and accelerated by certain violent hereditary images accumulated over several generations. This hypothesis, due to Professor Eustache, was itself divided into two sub-hypotheses, one envisaging only the toxicity of internal images, the other bringing into consideration the diffusion of “cinetexts,” or books with moving images.
Fourthly, the formation, because of overly frequent ethnic interbreeding and excessive naturalizations, of a race with tissues in unstable and, so to speak, ephemeral equilibrium. The adherents of this final explanation unleashed violent anger in the camp of the Polyplasts, to which I belonged, and almost provoked civil war by virtue of the epidemic character generally attributed to the Napus. I did not participate in these vain furies.
Soon, the rumor having circulated, falsely, that the Aristotle Foundation had discovered, as a consequence of explanation number two—the Sidoine thesis—an electrical vaccination against the Napus, a host of people from all walks of life presented themselves at the doors of our establishment, begging us to immunize them. It was no banal spectacle, the sight of all those panic-stricken individuals forming a queue for hours on end as if at the door of a bakery in a besieged town, only to hear that the news was premature and that several “preservatives”—that was the term of choice—were being studied but that nothing definite had yet been determined. The meager and minimal reserves of pity and charity subsisting among the Polyplasts, other than our friend 14,026, were used up and exhausted by it.
Nothing is more amusing than experimenting on oneself with the distillation of the last drops of the charitable emotion that all humanity experienced after the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I firmly believe, for my part, after having analyzed myself very thoroughly, that the exclusive scientific development of the human mind ended in that extinction of the two sentiments that stimulated admirable works, today almost incomprehensible to Polyplasts and laboratory workers in general. Laughter, in us, has dried up the tears that once passed for a relief, for a veritable anesthetic.
The progression of cases of “death without remains” in Paris, the suburbs and the provinces ensured that the multitude of supplicants thus evinced was augmented in disquieting proportions, at the same time as apprehension rendered them noisy and stormy. The convened authorities addressed themselves to the Foundation and urged it to find some means of calming minds and preventing the anguish of the plague from degenerating into riots, like those already produced in America, England, Germany and Italy.
Sidoine offered the opinion that all high- and very-high-tension electrical installations, as well as all wireless communication, should be suspended over the entire extent of the nation’s territory, even at the cost of the greatest economic, financial and commercial disturbance. It was a big decision to take; the Crown and its Ministers demanded time to reflect, all the more indispensable as the question was international, and, by virtue of the conflict of interests subordinate to wealth in electricity and waves, risked provoking grave diplomatic complications.
Super! the Polyplasts immediately thought. There’s going to be a scientific war! Victory will go to whomever, having discovered the secret of the Napus, can apply it to military operations.
Spurred on by the Ministry of Hygiene and the promise of a signal decoration to be worn in the middle of the thorax, Professor Ailette, for his part, immediately fabricated a cellular, or cytoplastic, broth at three francs a gram, composed of the mesenteries of young pigs and the lymphatic ganglia of previously-ionized veal-calves, with three additional doses of ultra-violet light and two doses of electric eel phosphorescence. According to him, no one who had ingested the remedy would be any longer susceptible to the Napus. He was running no risk of failure, no proof being possible that anyone who died without remains had taken the antiaphanasic broth or not. There was an urgent debate in the Council of Ministers as to whether to make the mixture obligatory for everyone in France, but the same whimsy that had presided over the manufacture caused the legal project to be set aside.
Suitably watered by the budget for so-called beneficial publicity, the press made a remarkable fuss of the “Ailette brew,” and fifty thousand hundred-gram bottles of it were sold within a week, which generated a very tidy profit for the Foundation, for Ailette and for the dancer (who immediately bought a comfortable residence overlooking the location of the ancient Arc de Triomphe devoted to the battles of the First Empire). It was a fine example of the naivety of the public, in which no one made the perfectly simple reflection that it was a matter of sucker-bait, like the powder that prevented flies from laying eggs that was all the rage in the twenty-second century, if one can believes the chronicles of the epoch, or the concoction of dog-dung launched as a general antiseptic and elixir of longevity by the Russian scientist Metchnikoff in 1909 or thereabouts.6
The Americans have always done things excessively, with a sort of intellectual and economic gigantism, as if by contrast with their predecessors the Aztecs, a small race who minimized everything. It was soon evident that the explosion of the Napus was three times as powerful beyond the Atlantic than here, and that its progression there was geometric rather than arithmetic, as in Europe. Undoubtedly, though, there was some exaggeration in the claims.
The Asiatic Napus, notably in Chins and Indochina, was accompanied by a dull thud, which was thought to come from the ground, and left a rather odorous residue, comparable to a piece of the sole of a foot shriveled into three lobes, somewhat reminiscent of a human doll. We asked for specimens, but the coolies on land and sea refused to handle them, claiming that one could catch the Napus by contact with them.
That etymological persistence of the term “Napus” through languages very distant from one another demonstrates the degree of terror and mental anxiety attached to the plague, such that people clung superstitiously to its initial denomination. The Chinese ideogram created with that intention, which the Japanese copied, represented it by a grid composed of three vertical strokes on the right. Introduced to a manuscript or a prayer-wheel, it was equivalent to the doubt arising from the sudden extinction of the personality, without one knowing into which part of the invisible the Dragon has carried it and hidden it. Commercial travelers in the Far East let it be known that the Sons of Heaven, to protect themselves, were chewing the sole-shaped residues, after having crushed them into a sort of disgusting powder.
That means was no more ridiculous or arbitrary than Ailette’s brew, but the members of the Aristotle Foundation were thrown into great perplexity by the fact that there now existed two forms of the Napus, one total, the other with a residue or relic. Electromagneto-radiant installations being less numerous in China and Asia than in Europe and America, Sidoine’s theory acquired a certain prestige thereby, which did not take long to complicate affairs.
With the blissful or artificial optimism characteristic of the ignorant, the most widely-circulated newspapers, which are the ones that provide the most inaccurate news—for the masses abhor truth as nature abhors a vacuum—had started out by declaring that the disease would not be generalized. On the contrary, it would become a rarity, or, at least, a temporary accident, due to obscure causes, and would disappear one day just as it had arrived. Far from taking that course, however, the Napus soon appeared as a new and unexpected catastrophe, firmly-established, which, threatening bodies to the extent of annihilating them, resounded in all the domains of the intellect.
It is true that ordinary death, death “with remains,” lies in wait for everyone from birth onwards, and all poets, preachers, and philosophers have embroidered beautiful and sometimes grandiose variations on that theme—but the threat of the new death, the death without remains, appeared to be something more redoubtable and more atrocious, in that it disturbed entrenched habits and extended depopulation even to the cemeteries. It was called the “blank epidemic,” and also the “empty epidemic.” In all the dailies, the necrological section was doubled in size, and necrology, properly speaking, became napusology. For example, one could read in the Vingt-troisième Siècle, in Le Figaro, and in Action Française—which had become, by force of circumstance, the official newspaper of the monarchy—news of this sort:
The Disease (with a capital D, because after two months one did not even say Napus any longer) has claimed another victim in the person of Monsieur d’Estampille, former Undersecretary of State for Finance, who disappeared yesterday at five p.m. at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and the Place de Rohan, in his fifty-fifth year. God has his soul! The commemorative service will be held at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule next Tuesday at ten a.m.
Or:
We record with regret the decease by the Disease of Mademoiselle Mahaufret (Élodie), disappeared in her property at Étampes, Les Clochettes, on Saturday the 14th at 3 p.m. God has her soul! The religious service will be held, etc.…
Or even:
It is with veritable dolor that we learn of the total disappearance of Professor Chestenèfre (Adhémar), which occurred during his lecture at the École de Médecine on Thursday last, in the large amphitheater at five p.m. The laic Astonishment will be held tomorrow, Saturday, in the courtyard of the Écoles in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince at noon. No flowers or wreaths.
The ceremony of “laic Astonishment” consisted of a sort of punch of honor dedicated to the memory of the deceased, in the course of which each member of the audience raised his eyes to the President of the Astonished and made the sign of the amazement caused by the sudden annihilation. I had the opportunity to be present at the Astonishment of that brute Chentenèfre, one of the last representatives of the scientific materialism of yore, in company with my cousin Polyplast 17,178, and I cannot describe the state of hilarity into which that baroque ceremony plunged us.
Some people boldly declared that, of the two faces of Death, they preferred the neater one, the one that boldly gave the lie to the celebrated axiom that “nothing is destroyed, nothing is created”—but the majority stubbornly refrained, out of superstition even from pronouncing the word “Napus,” and changed the subject if the topic arose in conversation.
The Disease, which had begun by striking old men or adults, went on from there quite rapidly to adolescents, notably of the female sex, and then to children, even nurslings, which suddenly disappeared from their mothers’ arms, leaving the breast bare. It seemed that the plague was thus re-climbing the slope of life from bottom to top. It was also remarked that it preferentially attacked perfectly healthy individuals, although that was not an absolute rule. Lunatics, ataxics, the tubercular and the syphilitic were in the front line in the statistics of hospitals and the private clientele.
