The Napus, page 6
This time, the members of the audience split their sides. There is nothing more amusing than a individual behaving entirely in accordance with his character or temperament, in circumstances in which neither his character nor his temperament is apposite. That was the case with Tonqueloque.
He darted around a suspicious all-encompassing glance—that of a schoolteacher to whose back the pupils have attached a placard and is wondering which one to punish. Then, abruptly shrugging his shoulders and snorting, the Minister of Inventions headed for the Bar.
“Another case, Messieurs, another case!”
A plump and short individual, a clerk in the Court of Cassation, came toward us giving signs of terror. He explained, breathlessly, that Counselor Bienmanié had just disappeared, at the moment when he was sitting down at his table—the second on the right of the fourth criminal chamber—and reaching out for a file.
The new produced a certain emotion. Bienmanié had been charged, the previous day, with compiling a report on the juridical implications of the Death without Remains. The question that preoccupied Eustache was visible in every face: Does occupying oneself with it expose one to becoming subject to it?
“Oh, the poor boy”—Bienmanié had been seventy-five, and the term boy hardly suited him—“was reluctant to take charge of that dossier. Did he foresee what has happened?”
“No, it’s pure chance.”
“There is no chance.”
Click! At the very moment when the sturdy magistrate, by the name of Capechard, emitted that by-no-means original aphorism, the sound of the “detonator” resounded, and the speaker vanished into thin air without a puff of smoke, without a whiff of odor, without anything.
The case was magnificent and clear, but I did my best to suppress my desire to laugh, which would have further increased the terror of all those lawyers.
Now, by virtue of an antithesis that Victor Hugo—over there on the right—would have loved, four centuries earlier, who did we see coming down the steps from the Court of Cassation, in his robe as well as his fresh and blood? Bienmanié in person—Bienmanié, whom all his colleagues had already begun mourning, and whose aphanasia had just been announced to us: Bienmanié returned, like a coin in the hand of a conjurer, while Capechard disappeared in the same fashion.
The idea of an exchange imposed itself on all of us, and one magistrate, who was particularly keen on being decorated, ran after Tonqueloque, the involuntary joker, in order to bring him up to date with that marvelous substitution. It was the raw material for a new curve.
Then an improbable scene took place. Bienmanié, informed of the clerk’s error, abused the latter roundly, calling him a cretin and a fool, without the slightest regard for the minute’s silence generally accorded to the spirits of napusified individuals. It was a very amusing spectacle: the modest functionary, harassed by that black ape, who seemed ready to devour him and was accusing him of having sought to bring misfortune down upon him.
Superstition was manifestly entering into everyone’s soul.
At the same time as superstition, however, a new sentiment and a great tenderness invaded me.
Little subject until then to the assaults of amour upon my rational carapace, in my quality as a Polyplast, I felt that aberration opening up to me under the new threat of the Napus. I began to look more attentively at the pretty girls passing by in the street. If the lovely Henriette Tastepain was late at the laboratory, I became anxious about her, and her footsteps behind the glazed door caused my heart to beat faster.
I had previously read descriptions of that weakness in ancient and modern authors, which had seemed to me to be baroque and incompatible with the dignity of a seeker of knowledge; now, that opinion of my youth came to seem baroque, and I thought about making up for lost time.
I confided in my friend Poly 14,026, who, to my great surprise, admitted that he too felt internally modified since the advent of aphanasia, and had begun to wonder whether the most reasonable use of such a brief and precarious existence was the one we were making of it.
If we men of the laboratory were in that situation with regard to the blonde goddess to whom Lucretius had dedicated his poem,9 it is easily imaginable that the rest of the nation had preceded us, and gone further. Never had the bonds between lovers been more tender than since they had been threatened by rupture by the Napus. Never had the symphonic song of the nightingale, the little winged conductor of the orchestra that he constitutes all by himself, appeared so delightful to the ear when it rose up at the advent of night above a field of perfumed lilies. Never had the scent of roses, assembled in a host on a rose-bush like red fireworks, surprised the sense of smell with such heady effluvia. Never had the slightly bitter perfume of lavender on Provençal hillsides carried lads and lasses to the land of carnal dreams in a more sparkling chariot. Never had a young man in love sitting on a strand, in a hollow between the rocks, beneath the emerging stars, enjoyed more voluptuously the vague silhouette of the object of his love dangling her little feet in the lukewarm salty water of the tide, gradually and unsteadily coming in.
The martial thoughts that haunted us as a consequence of the mixture of polyplastic bloodlines and the laborious contention of the laboratory—for tense analytical thought embodies a battle—began to give way to these strange impulsions..
In brief, we were softening.
One strange and sweet day was the one that Henriette Tastepain and I spent in the woods at Meudon toward the end of July, three months after the debut of the plague.
In the belief of the ancient urbanists of the early twentieth century, and their predictions, since recognized as false, the continual westward development of Paris through Passy, Auteuil, the Point-du-Jour etc. ought to have annihilated and absorbed the forested region that extends from Meudon to Villebon and beyond, where great rural properties had been built in the seventeenth century. On the contrary, however, it was toward the east and the north that Paris had developed after the great industrial and rural development of the twenty-first century and the legal limitation of non-electrical and non-magnetic factories. In the direction of Sèvres and Meudon, the sinuous snaking of the capital had, in fact, retracted somewhat, the ugly buildings and hangars of the factories on the banks of the Seine between Sèvres and Saint-Cloud giving way to charming villas and “follies” recalling those of the eighteenth century, while general farmers reappeared in an new guise.
So, the sun was shining and the blue of the sky caused strollers to forget, in the immediate chamber of the mind, the quotidian preoccupation with the terrible menace. The progression was still accelerating, but the newspapers, on our advice, had adopted a palliative strategy and again announced a discovery of a particular kind, permitting the plague to be driven back.
Henriette was wearing new clothes, which made her and her supple, well-proportioned body into a parcel of harmonious enchantment, superimposed on nature. It seemed that we could hear a distant song, emerging from an irrational hope, as there is behind the simultaneously desolate and confident themes of the immortal Beethoven.
We followed the bank of the river—or, to put it better, the most spiritual river in the world—the banks of which form the so-called Île de France, a trifle cold in the Occitan parlance that is now so widespread again, but delightfully sinuous and sober. She and I were talking about the desiccation to which the overly-exclusive pursuit of the infinite and indefinite problems of science leads, and about the necessity, for the sake of equilibrium, of the free development of natural sentiments.
I would never have suspected, on the part of my brilliant assistant, such resources of fantasy, such a placid and serene vision of earthly things, or such a youthful generosity. It was a delight for me. She joked about our friend 14,026 and his uniquely book-based and documentary conception of the universe, all the Polyplasts of our acquaintance, and all our professors—the Ailettes, the Sidoines and the Eustaches. She mimicked their tics, their accents and their manias. I learned to experience a laughter that was no longer grating, which was not that of the recognition of human fatality, but which liberated the soul by traversing it with its mocking arrow and dragging it out of the icy regions of pure understanding.
I had not come to the woods of Meudon since my bleak and studious youth, by reason of the intensive labor to which Polyplasts are subjected. Our professors of geology had taken us there to the limestone quarries that contained, before the Deluge, specimens of flora and fauna classified, declassified and reclassified twenty times over according to contemporary geologico-biological hypotheses—but the old forest with its six-hundred-year-old trees belonged to lovers that day.
Hidden behind vast trunks enflamed by solar rays, lovers kissed with open mouths, in such a fashion that their faces disappeared, as if swallowed up by their kisses. Others pecked as they went along, arms around one another’s waists in the fashion of peasant-women, or held one another by the little finger while walking a few steps ahead of their distracted parents, waiting to give them the slip in order to exchange their saliva avidly. They could be seen in the depths of thickets, looking one another in the eyes, without touching, with glowing and eager faces. They could be seen, intimidated by the entirely new sensation of reckless kissing replacing language, holding timid but heated discussions.
Here, a fiancé told a blushing fiancée how things would work out, when he had a job with a salary, and what the sumptuous menu of the wedding-feast would be. There, lying on the ground, each chewing a twig in order to make themselves look cool, a blond and a brunette were laughing because they were finally together in spite of the malignity of gossips, having the day to themselves. Some became sulky, but only briefly, in order to make up and be closer bound together. One girl extended a slender ear, like a little pink sea-shell, to receive a confidence, while another wagged a menacing finger, doubtless in response to a risqué suggestion, the risk of which was nevertheless exquisite.
The game of blind man’s buff over to the left, in the clearing sown with yellow roundels, with a simpleton whose eyes were bandaged, seemed the very image of amorous pursuit; while the game of tag that the children were playing permitted the brush of hands and fingers that is the Devil’s first temptation.
Such an atmosphere and such sights were well-calculated to induce desire in Henriette and myself. The plague was far away. Another scourge, this one adorable, was soliciting us, making our hearts beat in our bosoms and causing our desires to quiver like leaves in a warm breeze.
I took hold of the young woman’s round arm and held it tenderly against my own. She let me do it. I drew closer to her.
Half a dozen couples, similarly occupied and busy with the great business, who surrounded us, served better than solitude to conceal that nascent joy. We confronted the pulsation of our arteries and our lips came together, touching, at the rapid velocity of thought, like two swallows flying in the open air toward a common goal and confusing their wing-beats. I must confess that never had such delights presented themselves to me, even distantly, during my scientific research. Don’t tell me that it’s a matter of opposed orders of meditation; the organism is one and does not react in a different fashion to the curiosity of intelligence and that of the flesh.
After that experiment, beneath the decreasing fires of the day, we didn’t say a word. The eternal speech of lovers, with its first person singular, was itself postponed until later. We were reciprocally astonished to have waited so long—long months in daily contact—for the birth of an admission. I recalled certain ironic glances on the part of Mouillemouillard, certain joking allusions on the part of 14,026.
At the end of a sloping path, in the form of a kind of leafy country inn, the classic tastes of the environs of Paris solicited us: a glass of cold, light beer, a lightly-seasoned sausage, of which it was sufficient to remove the skin to dispel the ashy taste analogous to that of dull existence; and a hunk of fresh bread with a slight scent of wheat, although it was a crusty child of the immediate suburb. While the blissful discoverer of the fifth magnetic center of the cell employed her beautiful teeth I observed the charming oval of her jaw, well-articulated by hunger, laughter and love, delightedly.
We decided to dine in one of the small inns that have fortunately replaced the insipid palaces of old and honor the immutable dishes of the Parisian region, such as entrecote with “melted apples”—which don’t melt—and fish in the vinegary and incomparable Bercy sauce, surmounted by a pat of odorous butter. With love and the love of food—the only true ones—we had conquered the world at a single stroke.
But it has to be said that the day did not end without hiccups. As we set forth again, chatting about things of no consequence, to which we would not have given any thought the day before, we suddenly perceived a group of walkers who had stopped at the corner of a path in front of an object that we took at first for a hut.
It was a monstrous mushroom, three meters high, with the inflated foot of the edible mushroom and a cap under which a dozen people could have taken shelter from a storm.
An old warden explained to me that the phenomenon had grown there in the space of a single night. He added that, according to the “messieurs” from the botanical laboratory at Bellevue who had come to examine it the day before, it was a question of the same mysterious force that was making people disappear without trace. At that revelation, a black veil passed over the beautiful gilded dusk. Lovers of both sexes, as if sobered up, gazed at the sinister cryptogam in a melancholy fashion, which, obtaining its advantage from the same mysterious power that annihilated humans, had been turned into a giant by the Napus.
“Don’t get too close, Mesdames et Messieurs! It’s said that it’s not contagious, but all the same—one never knows!”
A dozen children, boys and girls ran up, laughing and jostling one another. At the sight of the fungal giant they became ecstatic, uttering cries of joy; then, holding hands, they started an infernal round-dance around its immense foot, to the rhythm of a popular song. The doubtless-philosophical warden hesitated momentarily as to whether to prevent them from mocking the monster, then reflected that the napusic explanation was doubtful and let the innocents have their way.
But the explanation was sound.
We soon learned, in fact, via telegrams sent from all points of the nation and various countries of Europe, that cryptogams of colossal size were appearing in various locations, accomplishing their growth overnight. There was no great harm in that, while it was a matter of edible mushrooms, although people hesitated nevertheless to cook them, for fear that their exorbitant dimensions might nauseate the most determined gourmets. As soon it was question of fly-agarics or amanitas, however, and the redouble spectrum of ink-caps, the fear was that the enormous receptacles of poison might poison, as they rotted, the ground in which they were growing.
In addition, clumps of these phenomena, attaining four or five meters in height and ten or twelve in circumference, appeared in places where it was not usual to encounter them, principally in the suburbs. Bourg-la-Reine, Clamart and Pantin were the worst-afflicted locales, in proportions such that the inhabitants had difficulty negotiating certain streets, which were completely obstructed.
Samples of these giants of the vegetal world were, of course, sent to the Foundation, where we analyzed them conscientiously, without discovering anything abnormal from a chemical or anatomical viewpoint. Ailette saw them as a reinforcement of his cellular hypothesis, Sidoine as support for his electromagnetic thesis. Eustache asserted that the two strange phenomena were completely unrelated—but it was evident to any mind deprived of prejudice that the relationship was close, and that the Napus, which was inimical to humans, stimulated growth and magnification in cryptogams.
That was an impenetrable mystery—and what else was going to happen?
For several weeks great botanists were seen running from one side of the country to the other: mysterious and manic individuals who were neither numerous not communicative, who usually toyed in silence with the Latin and Greek names that they applied to all the species of the vast vegetal realm. Their explanations did not differ sensibly from those of physiologists, cytologists and others, and were no more satisfactory to the intelligence.
As for the propagation of the Napus, it was neither relented nor diminished by that hypertrophic deviation, and the curve that we tracked on a daily basis, with scrupulous statistical care, continued its ascendant progress.
7. I have transcribed this neologism directly, as the author would have used a different term had he wanted to signify the equivalent of the English “personality” or “self-image.” Daudet was fond of improvising new words from Classical roots, and the reader will encounter several more in the course of the text.
8. In French, “eustache” is a slang term for a clasp-knife or a cut-throat razor.
9. The reference is to De rerum natura [On the Nature of Existence], the classic of skeptical Epicurean philosophy, which begins with a dedicatory invocation of Venus.
CHAPTER THREE
A FINE ACADEMIC DISCUSSION
It was on the fifteenth of September 2227—the first year of the Napus—that the great debate on the death without remains opened, before the combined academies and delegations from foreign institutes, which put the most celebrated parliamentary sessions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the shade. It was quickly evident therein that medical preoccupations with life and death, mingled with scientific quarrels, had set foot on the old seesaws of socialism, collectivism, egalitarianism, internationalism, humanitarianism, etc. that had once unleashed countless massacres and depopulated the planet under the pretext of pacifying it.
