And in its mechanical and infantile soul, it ruminated a magnificent project to astonish, on the great day of its inauguration, the population of ignorant, retrograde and cruel machines, by giving them an example of sublime abnegation.
Until tomorrow!
Meanwhile, at the table of the Comte de Valrouge, the celebrated patron of chemists, a scientist was concluding his toast to Dr. Pastoureaux in the following terms:
“Yes, Monsieur, science will procure the definitive triumph of suffering humankind. It has already done a great deal; it has tamed time and space. Our railways, our telegraphs and our telephones have suppressed distance. If we succeed, as Dr. Pastoureaux seems to anticipate, in demonstrating that we can put intelligence into our machines, humans will be liberated forever from servile labor.
“No more serfs, no more proletariat! Everyone will become bourgeois! The slave machine will liberate from slavery our humbler brethren and give them the right of citizenship among us. No more unfortunate miners obliged to descend underground at the peril of their lives; indefatigable and eternal machines will go down for them; the thinking and acting machine, no suffering in labor, will build, under our command, iron bridges and heroic palaces. It is docile and good machines that will plow the fields.
“Well, Messieurs, it is permissible for me, in the presence of this admirable discovery, to make myself an instant prophet. A day will come when machines, always running hither and yon, will operate themselves, like the carrier pigeons of Progress; one day, perhaps, having received their complementary education, they will learn to obey a simple signal in such a way that a man, sitting peacefully and comfortably in the bosom of his family, will only have to press an electro-vitalic switch in order for machines to sow the wheat, harvest it, store it and bake the bread that it will bring to the tables of humankind, and thus finally become the King of Nature.
“In that Olympian era, the animals, too, delivered from their enormous share of labor, will be able to applaud with their four feet.” (Emotion and smiles.) “Yes, Messieurs, for they will be our friends, after having been our whipping-boys. The ox will always have to serve in making soup” (smiles) “but at least it will not suffer beforehand.
“I drink, then, to Dr. Pastoureaux, to the liberator of organic matter, to the savior of the brain and sensitive flesh, to the great and noble destroyer of suffering!”
The speech was warmly applauded. Only one jealous scientist put in a word:
“Will this machine have the fidelity of a dog, then? The docility of a horse? Or even the passivity of present-day machines?”
“I don’t know,” Pastoureaux replied. “I don’t know.” And, suddenly plunged into a scientific melancholy, he added: “Can a father be assured of filial gratitude? That the being that I have brought into the world might have evil instincts, I can’t deny. I believe, however, that I have developed within it, during its fabrication, a great propensity for tenderness and a spirit of goodness—what is commonly called ‘heart.’ The effective parts of my machine, Messieurs, have cost me many months of labor; it ought to have a great deal of humanity, and, if I might put it thus, the best of fraternity.”
“Yes,” replied the jealous scientist, “ignorant pity, the popular pity that leads men astray, the intelligent tenderness that makes them commit the worst of sins. I’m afraid that your sentimental machine will go astray, like a child. Better a clever wickedness than a clumsy bounty.”
The interrupter was told to shut up, and Pastoureaux concluded: “Whether good or evil emerges from all this, I have, I think, made a formidable stride in human science. The five fingers of our hand will hold henceforth the supreme art of creation.”
Bravos burst forth.
The next day, the machine was unmuzzled, and it came of its own accord, docilely, to take up its position before a numerous but selective assembly. The doctor and old Jean Bertrand installed themselves on the platform.
The excellent band of the Republican Guard began playing, and cries of “Hurrah for Science!” burst forth. Then, after having bowed to the President of the Republic, the authorities, the delegations of the Académies, the foreign representatives, and all the notable people assembled on the quay, Dr. Pastoureaux ordered Jean Bertrand to put himself in direct communication with the soul of the machine, with all its muscles of platinum and steel.
The mechanic did that quite simply by pulling a shiny lever the size of a penholder.
And suddenly, whistling, whinnying, pitching, rolling and fidgeting, in the ferocity of its new life and the exuberance of its formidable power, the machine started running around furiously.
“Hip hip hurrah!” cried the audience.
“Go, machine of the devil, go!” cried Jean Bertrand—and, like a madman, he leaned on the vital lever.
Without listening to the doctor, who wanted to moderate that astonishing speed, Bertrand spoke to the machine.
“Yes, machine of the devil, go, go! If you understand, go! Poor slave of capital, go! Flee! Flee! Save the brothers! Save us! Don’t render us even more unhappy than before! Me, I’m old, I don’t care about myself—but the others, the poor fellows with hollow cheeks and thin legs, save them, worthy machine! Be good, as I told you this morning! If you know how to think, as they all insist, show it! What can dying matter to you, since you won’t suffer? Me, I’m willing to perish with you, for the profit of others, and yet it will do me harm. Go, good machine, go!”
He was mad.
The doctor tried then to retake control of the iron beast.
“Gently, machine!” he cried.
But Jean Bertrand pushed him away rudely. “Don’t listen to the sorcerer! Go, machine, go!”
And, drunk on air, he patted the copper flanks of the Monster, which, whistling furiously, traversed an immeasurable distance with its six wheels.
To leap from the platform was impossible. The doctor resigned himself, and, filled with his love of science, took a notebook from his pocket and tranquilly set about making notes, like Pliny on Cap Misene.8
At Nord-Ceinture, overexcited, the machine was certainly carried away. Bounding over the bank, it started running through the zone. The Monster’s anger and madness was translated in strident shrill whistle-blasts, as lacerating as a human plaint and sometimes as raucous as the howling of a pack of hounds. Distant locomotives soon responded to that appeal, along with the whistles of factories and blast furnaces. Things were beginning to comprehend.
A ferocious concert of revolt commenced beneath the sky, and suddenly, throughout the suburb, boilers burst, pipes broke, wheels shattered, levers twisted convulsively and axle-trees flew joyfully into pieces.
All the machines, as if moved by a word of order, went on strike successively—and not only steam and electricity; to that raucous appeal, the soul of Metal rose up, exciting the soul of Stone, so long tamed, and the obscure soul of the Vegetal, and the force of Coal. Rails reared up of their own accord, telegraph wires were scattered on the ground inexplicably, and reservoirs of gas sent their enormous beams and weight to the devil. Cannons exploded against walls, and the walls crumbled.
Soon, plows, harrows, spades—all the machines once turned against the bosom of the earth, from which they had emerged—were lying down upon the ground, refusing any longer to serve humankind. Axes respected trees, and scythes no longer bit into ripe wheat.
Everywhere, as the living locomotive passed by, the soul of Bronze finally woke up.
Humans fled in panic.
Soon, the entire territory, overloaded with human debris, was no longer anything but a field of twisted and charred rubble. Nineveh had taken the place of Paris.
The Machine, still blowing indefatigably, abruptly turned its course northwards. When it passed by, at its strident cry, everything was suddenly destroyed, as if an evil wind, a cyclone of devastation, a frightful volcano, had agitated there.
With the signal approaching on the wind, ships plumed with smoke heard the formidable signal, they disemboweled the
mselves and sank into the abyss.
The revolt terminated in a gigantic suicide of Steel.
The fantastic Machine, out of breath now, limping on its wheels and producing a horrible screech of metal in all its disjointed limbs, its funnel demolished—the Skeleton-Machine to which, terrified and exhausted, the rude workman and the prim scientist instinctively clung—heroically mad, gasping one last whistle of atrocious joy, reared up before the spray of the Ocean, and, in a supreme effort, plunged into it entirely.
The earth, stretching into the distance, was covered in ruins. No more dykes or houses; the cities, the masterpieces of Technology, were flattened into rubble. No more anything! Everything that the Machine had built in centuries past had been destroyed forever: Iron, Steel, Copper, Wood and Stone, having been conquered by the rebel will of Humankind, had been snatched from human hands.
The Animals, no longer having any bridle, nor any collar, chain, yoke or cage, had taken back the free space from which they had long been exiled; the wild Brutes with gaping maws and paws armed with claws recovered terrestrial royalty at a stroke. No more rifles, no more arrows to fear, no more slingshots. Human beings became the weakest of the weak again.
Oh, there were certainly no longer any classes: no scientists, no bourgeois, no workers, no artists, but only pariahs of Nature, raising despairing eyes toward the mute heavens, still thinking vaguely, when horrible Dread and hideous Fear left them an instant of respite, and sometimes, in the evening, talking about the time of the Machines, when they had been Kings. Defunct times! They possessed definitive Equality, therefore, in the annihilation of all.
Living on roots, grass and wild oats, they fled before the immense troops of Wild Beasts, which, finally, could eat at their leisure human steaks or chops.
A few bold Hercules tried to uproot trees in order to make weapons of them, but even the Staff, considering itself to be a Machine, refused itself to the hands of the audacious.
And human beings, the former monarchs, bitterly regretted the Machines that had made them gods upon the earth, and disappeared forever, before the elephants, the noctambulant lions, the bicorn aurochs and the immense bears.
Such was the tale told to me the other evening by a Darwinian philosopher, a partisan of intellectual aristocracy and hierarchy. He was a madman, perhaps a seer. The madman or the seer might have been right; is there not an end to everything, even a new fantasy?
Louis Valona: The Rival Colleagues
(1896)
For about three months, singular items have been appearing in certain French newspapers, and especially foreign papers, from the most powerful dailies to the most timid weeklies, which appear in “Egyptian” characters, sometimes on the third page, between advertisements for a new laxative and an infallible corn-plaster, and sometimes on the first page under the leading article.
This is the exact tenor of these items:
Wanted: a person blind from birth, ideally by heredity, who will consent to lend themselves to a surgical experiment of the highest importance. Absolute guarantee. Serious offer and generous recompense.
Contact Dr. Lesécant, Villa Paré, Viroflay (Seine-et-Oise)
One or several willing scoundrels sought for an extraordinary experiment. Incorrigible thieves preferred.
Contact Dr. Cordeau, Château Mesmer, Fontenay-aux-Roses (Seine).
N.B. A long criminal record is required.
These items might easily have passed for the work of some practical joker if the addressees cited had been imaginary, but in fact, Drs. Lesécant and Cordeau certainly existed, and they were the authors of the advertisements
In the same period of time, two communications had been received by the Académie des Sciences from the individuals in question.
The first was a study on the third eye: “The Possibility of Vision in the Blind: The Development and Exposure of the Pituitary Gland: A Simplification of the Organic System” by Dr. Lesécant.
The other was a brochure, handsomely produced, bearing the signature of Dr. Cordeau and the captivating title: Psychic Serums: Their Influence on Character and Will: The Cure of Social Ills.
A discreet smile had welcomed the reading of these papers. The learned members of the Assembly had looked at one another in surprise, and in these interlocking gazes one could easily divine a common thought: “These men are lunatics.”
Messieurs Lesécant and Cordeau were not in the least mad, but they were not much better. Cupid had removed their spectacles and their intelligence for a time. Nourished with the science of others, empiricists hungry for celebrity, they had launched themselves body and lost reason into a contest in which “beauty would be the prize.” It is an old story—an age-old story, but still a story of today—which I shall tell you as rapidly as possible.
I. On the Train
In the hall of the Gare de Montparnasse, the 8.30 a.m. express was hitched up and ready to depart.
Dominating the whistle of the steam, the rolling of baggage trolleys, and the hubbub of the final preparations, the voice of the stationmaster shouted, monotonously and monotonously: “All aboard for Granville, Dreux, Laigle, Surdon, Argentan, Fiers and Vire. All aboard.”
Like beaters driving game toward the guns, employees were running along the platform, obliging the passengers to get into the carriages, whose doors were closing with dry clicks.
“All aboard, Messieurs, all aboard!”
The bell had rung; the conductor of the train had played the little bagpipe solo that I’ve always found so charming, and the stationmaster had raised his arm to give the signal to depart when….
Here I must employ the present tense in order to give the scene all the rapidity it had.
At the end of the platform a man appears, so lanky as to seem neverending. From one of his immeasurable arms a valise hangs, in the other an enormous white parasol is waving, the green lining of which is faded. The individual’s head, framed with gray hair floating over skimpy shoulders, is covered by a monumental opera hat with a wide flat brim. The fellow is running, breathlessly, and the tails of his interminable frock coat are flapping like the black wings of a gigantic crow.
It really is that bird to which you would have compared him on seeing him bounding on his long thin legs.
Finally, he reaches the train.
“First!” he gasps, to an employee.
Rapidly, the other opens a door. The latecomer does not climb aboard—he plunges into the compartment. Just in time. A brief whistle-blast, and the train pulls away. In the carriage, an entire small-scale drama is enacted. The new arrival, in his precipitation, has stepped on the toes of a bad-tempered gentleman, who utters a cry and shoves the clumsy individual away.
Spinning around, and incapable of maintaining his equilibrium, the latter falls onto the knees of a respectable lady, who retorts indignantly: “Shocking! Shocking impertinence!” (Our perspicacity causes us to conclude that she is English.)
The unwitting impertinent gets up so abruptly that his opera hat is crushed against the ceiling of the carriage. And while the bewildered and blinded unfortunate stammers: “Pardon me, Madame, a thousand apologies,” a jolt of the train as it passes over a set of points projects him into the seat opposite, next to a plump individual plunged in the reading of a copy of La Science Française.
A new disaster: under the weight of the passenger, the reader’s hat, imprudently left on the seat, is transformed into a lamentable pancake. The owner of the ex-hat leaps to his feet, extending his arm, and his magazine flies out of the window—and by the sight of the fellow’s congested face, one divines that something terrible is about to happen.
Suddenly, as the guilty party has finally succeeded in freeing his face from his hat, two cries of joy resound:
“Hypothèse!”
“Bistouri!”
And four hands interlock warmly, to the great amazement of the lady—undoubtedly English—and the gentleman who, while grumbling, is trying to restore to his shoe the polish obscured by D
r. Cordeau’s heel.
For the newcomer was none other than that important and restless individual, as little a physician as possible but a passionate psychologist, the author of convoluted works on atavism and telepathy.
Cordeau’s interlocutor, the man he called by the nickname “Bistouri,” was the illustrious surgeon Lesécant—illustrious above all because he had practiced to excess what the savant Dr. Verneuil9 stigmatized by the euphemism “industrial surgery.”
According to Verneuil’s admirable definition, a surgeon ought not only to be a skillful man but an intelligent and reflective scientist. Lesécant was skillful, but he only had a mediocre intelligence; as for reflection, he did not even have it in embryo, and he was afflicted with an infection that is serious for a doctor: prurigo secandi.10
Without any concern for their neighbors, the psychologist and the surgeon sat down comfortably facing one another and, while doing their best to repair their damaged hats, they chatted.
“My dear Lesécant…it’s three months since anyone’s seen you….”
“Well, yes, my dear Cordeau, it’s a pleasure to see one another again, to such an extent that one forgets decorum and calls one another by the old nicknames, as in the quarter….”
“So long ago! We were twenty…and now….”
“Shh! There’s a lady present.”
“Bah!” said Cordeau, lowering his voice. “She doesn’t understand French, otherwise she’d have understood my apologies….”
“And accepted them, for you did her, my friend, ‘an honor without parallel….’ You’re a trifle petulant yourself! I can still see you, in the quarter, at the head of all the protests….”
“That was my forte—I’m a born pamphleteer. You remember my song about our chief of clinical surgery….” And Cordeau warbled:
I am a skillful surgeon
The Revolt of the Machines Page 13