by Theo Varlet
The decree, bright forth by everyone’s wishes, was welcomed in Paris as a necessary evil. People resigned themselves to an inevitable obedience, as occurs in numerous cases when docility to laws results less from real respect for them and voluntary consent as from simple inertia, every new regulation, however absurd and incomprehensible, silently tightening the belt of social constraint girdling every citizen of a civilized state by one more notch.
Besides, deprived of the magnetism of the press, whose role is to polarize the currents of public opinion, the latter, left to itself, remained fragmentary and individual, scattered in crumbs of divergent expression that no longer succeeded in coming together or settling into a common formula.
Without asking questions, without wondering overmuch how it would end, people started out having confidence in the government.
They were disoriented by the rupture of habits, but they enjoyed, with surprise and timidity, the abrupt release from and suppression of technological tyranny. Even those who were not laid off felt liberated from a constraint that had previously gripped them without their being aware of it. And to be able to go anywhere without risking the customary itching in a locality invaded by lichen! The first three days, October 23, 24 and 25, gave the impression in Paris of an indefinitely-prolonged Sunday: a Londonesque Sunday, of gray and insipid—almost lukewarm—weather, with no other distractions than going for a walk, to the café and the sampling of zebi from ambulant merchants’ carts.
The terraces were overflowing. As on a taxi-less May Day, crowds filled the streets, where the traffic was thin and moving to a new rhythm, with their muted flow. The usual noisy harassment of the immense mechanical herd, with its motors and blasting horns, had almost disappeared; it was necessary once again to become accustomed to the rumble of iron-clad wheels and the clatter of horseshoes on asphalt or wooden pavements. Calèches, tilburys, charrettes anglaises, coupés, landaus, victorias—all those names read in the Larousse illustré, emerged from the oubliettes of memory in order to label the antediluvian vehicles trotting along at six kilometers an hour. A few police cars, however, with engines hermetically armored and sterilized by special procedures, gave evidence, along with the multiple squads of agents on bicycles, in unsuspected numbers, and the overhead drone of aircraft with badges continually patrolling the skies of Paris, of governmental precautions that nothing seemed as yet to require in that amorphous flow of the sabbatical crowd, which had no idea what to do with its liberty. And people followed with an approving gaze the large tricks with magneto-less Diesel engines, rolling ostentatiously along the great boulevards, the sight of which reassured them about the regularity of deliveries to Les Halles.
But all that—that calm, that peace, that facile and harmonious obedience to the decree—was in the center of Paris. It did not extend at a sure pace beyond the perimeter of the Parisian zone: the new interior frontiers that separated us from the rest of France.
I did not get my first suspicion of that difference until the first evening, thanks to the gossip of Madame Taquet, whose husband had a comrade engaged as an auxiliary policeman in the special brigade responsible for verifying sterilizations at the departure of travelers from the Gare de Lyon.
Driven by the anxious and idle consciousness that had invaded my incomplete self, I resolved to get to the bottom of it. The memory came back to me of my old bike, dismantled and stored away a couple of years before in a cupboard in my studio. I took it out, reassembled it and, the following morning, rode as far as the Villeneuve-Saint-Georges exit, where two posts had been established, with their barracks, facing one another on opposite sides of the road: one forbidding entry to the Parisian zone to automobiles with imperfectly-sealed magnetos, the other ensuring the sterilization of vehicles and individuals at the frontier of the healthy zone. It was a mess: a traffic-jam of trucks and autos such as had never been seen at the gates of Paris in the days of the bulletin vert on race days.
It was there, too, in a defoliated country inn where I stopped for a while to drink a glass of white wine while watching the Seine flow by, that I heard talk of the illicit “trafficking” of the improvised police. On the roads more than at the railway stations, which were better supervised, numerous travelers were leaving Paris after nightfall in vehicles made up to simulate watertight cladding and penetrating into the healthy zone, avoiding the obligatory disinfection.
I believe, in truth, that outside Paris, the decree was only observed in an approximate fashion during the first three days. The provincial dailies that I had the opportunity to read gave me other evidence, by virtue of the further nuclei of Lichen that were still becoming manifest in France.
Their strangulation must often have been delayed by negligence and selfish calculations, and not only on the part of individuals; it appears that municipalities were too slow to cut off the electricity supply, waiting until half the commune was invaded before doing so. It required, moreover, a certain measure of abnegation to put oneself in quarantine and set up guard-posts at the crossroads obliging automobiles coming from healthy regions to go around the locality henceforth without going in.
If I had not taken the trouble to go and see for myself, however, I might never have divined that underside of the situation. We were walled up in Paris by an invisible but nevertheless efficacious partition, without rapid and reliable news of the rest of France and the world.
No more Parisian newspapers. Outside of a few little political broadsheets printed on hand-presses, but so evidently mendacious that they were not worth the five sous, all that was to be found in the kiosks were provincial papers. It cost too much to send provincial papers to Paris by air, however, and by railway, the speed of goods trains scarcely reaching 20 kilometers an hour, so the Nouvelliste de Lyon, the Moniteur du Puy-de-Dôme and the Dernières Nouvelles de Strasbourg arrived a day late, and only contained outdated information.
There were loudspeakers, forbidden in ordinary times on the public highway but tolerated in the circumstances, which bellowed the news to passers-by. Those of the great dailies, among others, claimed to be substituting temporarily for the printed editions, but a rigorous censorship must have been in force, for the news was uniformly optimistic. According to them, the “electric law” was scrupulously obeyed throughout France and the scourge was thwarted. A little more patience…etc.
People felt more isolated from the true facts than by the official communiqués of the war. The desire to be informed, the hope of finding someone who had seen or learned something, trustworthy eye-witnesses, was driving people to seek out friends and acquaintances and to engage in conversation with anyone, on the slightest pretext or none at all.
As for me, I made the effort to see a few comrades, but they knew no more than I did, and I rapidly wearied of any conversation into which I could not soon introduce Aurore’s name. Twice in three days I went to the Rue Legendre in the hope of talking about her, but Géo was at his factory in Saint-Denis and Luce had left in an airplane with Lendor J. Cheyne, who was to give a lecture in Bordeaux, according to Madame Ricourt. The old lady’s gossip did not interest me, and I left her to her occupations.
The sympathy manifested toward “Mademoiselle Lescure” by my worthy aunt contributed more than anything else to draw me to the Frémiets, but I was not otherwise insensible to the affectionate welcome I received there. Besides, little Oscar’s radio was working again, thanks to a set of batteries that his father had finally consented to buy him.
“What about the decree?” I asked him, when the excited boy told me the good news. “What are you doing about that, young wireless enthusiast? You’re infringing it, for piles and accumulators if I’m not mistaken are among the sources of electricity whose use is prohibited.”
“But everyone’s doing it,” Oscar retorted.
“The fact is,” my uncle admitted, “that according to the strict letter of the decree, we’re in contravention—but as the boy says, everyone’s doing it, from the big newspapers with their loudspeaker
s to the meanest individual. The electricity police have other things to do than make domestic visits—other cats to skin, with the disinfections and the automobiles. In sum, there’s tolerance, as the newspapers have observed.”
Another indication of the mildness with which the decree was enforced, in those early days of insouciance.
I dined with the Frémiets on October 25. That evening, the radio station in Lausanne, having offered the condolences of the Federal Government to the French people, so harshly tested, informed us that Belgium had fallen victim to its loyalty to France in not closing it frontier. The lichen had appeared in Brussels. On the other hand, the same misfortune had befallen Spain and Italy, which had cut off communications on the 21st. Barcelona was contaminated, as well as San Remo and Genoa, apparently thanks to smuggling operations—which did not prevent Italian opinion from being rather hard on us; there was rumor circulating in Rome, in certain imperialist circles, that French aircraft had come by night to sow lichen spores on the Ligurian Riviera!
My uncle laughed at that. “Oh yes, of course! They’re crazy!”
I recalled the ridiculous rumors that had circulated in the beginning. “Here, it was a ‘gift from the Boche,’ remember?”
“Yes. All that’s just words, fortunately. The worst of it is that this stupid accusation by a few Italian chauvinists, comes just at the moment when France, by virtue of the decree, is doing the right thing. For it goes without saying that, as a disarmament measure, it will go one better than Briand and the late Stresemann.28 The Societé des Nations ought to congratulate our government, which has dared to issue such a decree!
Ordinarily, my uncle only expressed his pacifist opinions very discreetly, but that evening he got carried away. His point of view surprised me; I hadn’t yet thought about that. For the first time, I saw that awkward consequence of the de-electrification of Paris, the South-East and other contaminated regions: the country defenseless, incapable of mobilization.
“So,” he said, “the case is being heard. It hasn’t been done expressly for that purpose, but the experiment is no less conclusive for that: a nation can find itself in a state of disarmament without immediately provoking a shock attack, as the warmonger claim.”
“A shock attack? Hmm? How do we know? Perhaps it’s taking place right now, at the frontier.”
“At the frontier? No, my lad, it would already have happened and not at the frontier: on Paris, by air, with the most up-to-date methods: gas projectiles.”
I fund a response immediately. “The attacker would be too frightened of catching the contagion of the lichen. The whole point of a shock attack would be to take subsequent possession of our country, wouldn’t it? To occupy it—and to occupy it would be to re-establish the communications that our good neighbors have hastened to cut off.”
My uncle got out of it by means of a paradox.
“That’s a great pity—for if France had not been isolated so quickly, the entire world would have been invaded by the lichen, and then, farewell to the matamores’29 hopes of rapid mobilization. It would be the end of war.”
“Yes, uncle, but you’re not thinking about what would become of civilization if electricity were to remain banished from our world. You, as a photographer...”
“Bah! It’s necessary not to think only of oneself. And one can take photographs with magnesium—people were content for a long time with sunlight. Occupational convenience apart, I’m not overly attached to it—to electricity. We did without it 50 years ago, and civilization, as you put it, didn’t do too badly. If the loss were to be compensated by a durable abolition of war, I’d bless it with all my heart.”
“But people would continue to kill one another by other means. It’s a necessity of human nature.”
As usual when my uncle expressed his subversive views, my aunt sighed silently and looked at me sadly. I took pity on her and didn’t persist.
That same day, October 25, a few hours after that family evening, while I stayed in my studio to wait for the afternoon post and perhaps a letter from Aurore, I had received a visit from Alburtin.
“Left Marseilles on October 23 at 4 p.m., arrived this morning in Paris at 6 p.m.—yes, my lad, 38 hours in transit! And I had to submit to two disinfections in the course of the journey, on exiting from contaminated zones—the first at Orange, the frontier of the south-east region. Worse than going through customs! They made us get out of our supposedly-infected train, put on gas masks and go through a chamber full of bromide aerosol carrying our luggage—and then into another shed for a ‘sporoscope’ examination, to see whether we were still carrying spores. Then on to another train, reeking of bromine…same story after Lyons, an infected zone, at Villefranche. France has broken up into a patchwork of petty countries. It’s true that with the slowness of present communications, it’s as if it had become four or five times larger...
“Note, too, my dear Delvart, than on leaving Marseilles the day before yesterday, there was no question of the decree; otherwise, I wouldn’t have started off. A bad blow for me, this ‘electric law’—but I did well, even so, to come to Paris...”
What the Ricourts had told me about their annoyances in Cassis had only been a prelude for Alburtin. Holding him responsible for the importation of the lichen, the fishermen of Cassis, whose motor-boats were no longer working, joining forces with the workers at the factories of La Bédoule, electrically equipped and immobilized by short-circuits, had come to the clinic in force one evening, invaded it and sacked it, obliging the nurses to transport the patients to the nearby hospital.
“You see, Delvart, there was a band of 200 or 300 fanatics filling the Rue Droite and shouting ‘Death to the Boche!’ For, in their eyes, I was a spy in the service of a foreign power, who had poisoned the region deliberately! The policeman and the two guards couldn’t do anything, and the gendarmes had been locked in the gendarmerie. I suspect my colleague Dr. Martin of having staged the coup in order to put an end to my competition. In brief, I was obliged to flee by night in my car with my wife and Madame Narisnska, and we sought refuge with friends in Marseilles.
“That happened on the very day when I discovered that an ointment of lead oxide radically reduces the itching caused by the radioactivity of the lichen sores. You know that radiologists wear lead-line gloves to protect their hands against radiation—but no one would have wanted an ointment, so I replaced it with a lead-based soap, with which it’s sufficient to wash in the morning and the evening to achieve desensitization. In Marseilles, my product, launched by a large perfume-manufacturer, was bound to secure the contentment of the population. I saw the future smiling on me again, and in order to obtain a monopoly in Paris I came here to patent my invention.”
“My poor friend, you’re too late! No one here is scratching any longer, since yesterday.”
“With your electric law, it’s no use. And who knows when I’ll receive the indemnity that I’m claiming from the government for the sack of my clinic? It’ll be necessary to establish the responsibility for not having been able to stop that mob, which the town of Cassis and the State will try to pass off on one another…there’s some good news even so. I’ve seen Nathan and he’s given me a job as a laboratory assistant in his research facility at Eyguzon. In the name of his old friendship for his former pupil, he told me. Perhaps he also has some remorse about not even having mentioned me in his article for the Intran. But one has to admire the irony of things: out there I’ll be under the orders of Mademoiselle Aurore Lescure…the person who made the world the jolly gift that cost me so dear!”
That announcement made me regret not being a scientist myself, qualified to obtain an analogous position. I would be out there beside her instead of fretting in Paris.
I envied the luckless Alburtin with all my heart.
As he was leaving that same evening for Eyguzon, I gave him a letter, already stamped, that I had intended to put in the post, in which I begged Aurore to specify the duration of her presence in the laborato
ry. That uncertainty alone, in fact, had stopped me from taking the train that day, or setting off toward her by bicycle. But to depart at hazard was to expose myself to the risk of making an unnecessary journey, and—worse still—of missing her, since she might be coming back to Paris on a regular basis. That letter, dictated by my heart, contained, I believe, words capable of touching her—and I had had the courage not to make any allusion to the Cheyne-Luce intimacy.
The demonstration of the workless on October 25 was a first indication of the increasing discontent and weariness that was about to put an end to the placid resignation of the first days of the Great Shutdown.
A certain quantity of the unemployed had been able to enroll in the special brigade of ant-electric police, improvised to ensure obedience to the decree. These detectives of a new kind set out under the insignia of red armbands with decorated with an X—for Xenobiota. The populace took to calling them “the Xs” or “the electrics.” They were in the railway stations, on the roads at the frontiers of the Parisian zone, in the disinfection services. All of these were immediately put to work, but those who were seen wandering the streets, to check whether the rare automobiles in circulation satisfied the demands of the law, had so little to do on the first three days that people got used to joking about “all those idle Xs, who have an easy time of it.” Their activity, and their attributions, were to extend singularly, however, and confer a sad celebrity upon them.
A few hundred more of the unemployed had been absorbed by the gas companies, for the reinstallation of street-lighting. Others, ex-power workers, reverted to being coachmen, either of fiacres or the incongruous vehicles such as charabancs, mail-coaches, delivery carts and horse-drawn omnibuses, with the aid of which an embryonic public transport system was reorganized in Paris.