The Petitpaon Era

by Henri Austruy

  Partisans and adversaries of Abbé Mortol cut short the customary manifestations and various cries in order to hear Louis Méripal speak.

  He began by calling “Petitpaon warfare” a poor joke.

  With the utmost gravity, President Perruquet forbade the orator to pronounce the name of the first magistrate of the Republic, evidently more at home in a lewd song or the couple of an end-of-year revue than a parliamentary debate.

  To General Croppeton, who claimed the responsible paternity of the project, Méripal riposted: “So be it! You, Courage, are the father, but where is the mother, Fear?”

  “I have never known her!” Croppeton declared.

  “She has, however, given you a child—this project that you are presenting to us, ridiculously smeared.”

  “You’re insulting world peace!” President Perruquet intervened.

  “You call this world peace—this lamentable pantomime that you’re organizing to safeguard the privileges of soldiers who no longer want to play their roles to the end?”

  “We are not actors!” protested General Croppeton, with dignity.

  “You’re the posturing hams of Death!” Méripal continued. “Go, then, and put on your most flamboyant uniforms; take up your rifles, sabers, revolvers, bayonets; to the sound of brilliant fanfares, make the emblems of murder flutter in the wind, drag cannons and machine-guns to some corner of the world where, for years on end, you will render illusory any hope of a crop, and perform the spectacular play of which Monsieur Coffre and his like will collect the authors’ royalties in the form of equipment and munitions! And it’s that frantic wastage, that cleverly organized destruction of human effort, which you’re baptizing with the name of peace?

  “Confess, then, that you’re afraid of peace—of veritable peace! Oh, because that’s the day when human labor will only serve to assure the well-being of life, which will appear to everyone sufficiently worthy of being lived for no gaze to be tempted any longer by the afterlife, and every priest will be charged with imposture!”

  A frightful racket drowned out Méripal’s voice, who threw his speech to the stenographers: “Peace will come in spite of you, Monsieur l’Abbé Mortol, zealot of the eternal Moloch, in spite of you, Messieurs the warriors, and in spite of you, Monsieur Coffre, all united like fairground thieves around the Mère Gigogne of Faith, to bring about the earthly reign of the tyranny of iron and gold!”

  Beneath the boos and ironic applause, Louis Méripal calmly went to the bar, and did not even deign to go back into the Chambre to vote against the plan, which was passed with an enormous majority.

  In the Senate, the discussion was brief; only Monsieur Jadis raised his voice, alleging that it was his duty to declare that times had changed a great deal, and that when he was twenty years old, he would never have suspected that he would one day see such things as living dead men.

  In his capacity as the Executive, Bernard Petitpaon promulgated by decree, countersigned by all the ministers, the idea that he had had, and which was to become, under the name of the “Petitpaon law,” not only a French law but a law inscribed in all languages on the pages of the codes of all the peoples, to enjoy full international effect from noon on the first of September of the present year of the Gregorian calendar, as measured at the Paris Observatory.

  III

  The first of September thus became a universal feast day, as if the most highly-reputed saints of the various sects and religions presently in use had been given the word to accomplish on that precise date a miraculous gesture worthy of simultaneously attracting the attention of all their faiths.

  The French Republic was obliged, in its own eyes and those of the world, to celebrate with royal sumptuousness the first evolution accomplished around the sun by our planet under a regime that would, in the opinion of historians—the more-or-less clear-sighted and faithful concierges of the past—throw the doors wide open to an era that it was legitimate, although infinitely flattering for France, to call “the Petitpaon Era.”

  Paris had made grandiose preparations for that solemnity, which was not merely the anniversary of a notable event but also the commemoration of a victory that the valiant French tricolor had won over a negro people.

  Almost the day after the international convention, to which he had subscribed by having his ambassador hand over an ivory tablet engraved with solemn engagements, a potentate reigning in the heart of Africa over half a million pairs of anthropophagous jaws had indulged in gastronomic deviations with regard to the persons of two Marseillais travelers, whom he had accommodated in a bouillabaisse of which he was fond. No country worthy of the name could permit an African king to treat its nationals as mere comestibles, and it was the most elementary duty on the part of France to trouble the digestion of that lover of white meat. She took care not to fail in it; the Chambres voted unanimously, save for the votes of Louis Méripal and Abbé Mortol, for the immediate mobilization of a small army of forty thousand men, of which a renowned tactician very much in fashion, General Marquis de Foiraubilles, took command.

  The newspapers published the portrait of that anticipated victor over one of the corners of the map approximately depicting the hereditary domains of King Haricot VII, which explorers, save for the two unfortunate Marseillais, had only visited in their boldest dreams.

  The coefficient of destructive power accorded by the treaty to French arms was ten for the dead and ten for the wounded. In other words, every French infantryman, cavalier or artilleryman, operating globally and in the proportions prescribed by the general staff regulations and sensibly equal conditions of combat, would kill or wound a number of enemies equal to ten times the proportion established by the coefficient appropriate to the antagonistic nation.

  In the cafés and the brasseries, the regulars, young and old, abandoned their favorite games in order to occupy themselves exclusively with the expedition. Mathematicians, blackening marble tables with giant rules of three victoriously penciled, demonstrated with a very natural patriotic emotion that in the first total engagement bringing the French army into conflict with that of Haricot VII, the latter would, ipso facto, be annihilated.

  The eloquence of figures is justly reputed to be unequaled. It was, in fact, indisputable that, one Frenchman being able to kill ten enemies and wound as many, forty thousand Frenchmen could therefore kill or wound four hundred thousand negroes. The result of that arithmetical operation, every time it was proclaimed, was welcomed with delirious acclamations, and everyone drank, to the point of the most complete drunkenness, to the health of the triumphant Republic.

  In an estaminet near the École Militaire, a former accountant in a bank was manhandled for having claimed that, from that number of four hundred thousand dead it was necessary immediately to subtract the number of wounded, which would similarly be four hundred thousand. Savage cries of “Death to all the Haricots!” responded to him. In vain the poor man tried to demonstrate that on a battlefield, wounds always precede death, even in the cast of apparent instantaneity.

  In the Rue du Croissant, a gang of students attacked and sacked the offices of a newspaper that had published the losses that the French army would suffer. In vain the editor tried to discuss the matter with the demonstrators, to prove to them that his figures were the rigorously exact result of the international tables that attributed to the soldiers of King Haricot VII a coefficient of one nine-hundredth for the dead and one two-hundredth for the wounded. In other terms, their individual value produced a ninth of one percent and five wounded per thousand among the enemies they encountered. The chauvinistic scholars did not want to hear it; they hit the unfortunate journalist so hard and often that the police—who arrived, in conformity with the customs of their organization, once their presence had become an unnecessary luxury—only found a cadaver, which they transported to the Morgue.

  He was the first victim of the war.

  The concentration of the army took place in Marseilles. The embarkation presented serious difficulti
es because of the population, which could not resolve to be separated from the soldiers to whom France had confided the care of avenging the two sons of the Cannebière.

  For General Marquis de Foiraubilles, the hour of the departure naturally sounded last.

  Bernard Petitpaon accompanied the supreme leader of the expedition to the Gare de Lyon personally.

  All along the special train, decked in tricolor flags, the classic scene of adieux unfolded. The officers of the General’s staff boarded the saloon-carriages first, immediately putting their variously-plumed heads out of the windows.

  Captain Sylphe was the last of them; he kissed the cheeks of Mademoiselle Hermine de Foiraubilles, to whom he was engaged. His future mother-in-law hugged him in her arms, catching her horn-rimmed binocle in his regulation feathers. As he pulled away, the captain broke the cord passed around the neck of the general’s wife, and the frail optical instrument fell to the ground. Gallantly, Bernard Petitpaon bent down to pick it up; he observed that one of the lenses was broken and, as he was superstitious, he had a moment of dizziness that obliged him to lean on General Croppeton’s arm.

  After handshakes and countless accolades, General Marquis de Foiraubilles, his bicorn hat in battle order, his right hand over his heart and his left on the hilt of his sword, climbed into his carriage, of which Admiral Théhyx closed the door.

  The Messidor decree reserved to the representative of the ecclesiastical authority the honor of giving the train, with his supreme blessing, the signal to depart.8 Cardinal Pecari having forbidden the most modest aspergillum to put in an appearance, however, the director of protocol had been obliged to laicize the ceremony. A silver whistle had been specially constructed for the august lips of the President of the Republic, operating in the stead of the sulking God.

  Bernard Petitpaon made the gesture of raising to his lips the whistle that had been presented to him by a gold-braided individual, but his arm fell back and, in response to a few briefly-articulated words, the obedient servant disappeared, as if by enchantment, to return a minute later brandishing a bugle.

  Bernard Petitpaon wiped the mouthpiece of the instrument with his dogskin-clad palm, and, with his singer’s lungs largely dilated, he drew a formidable blast from the bras instrument.

  The locomotive-driver leaned on the lever that set the engine in motion with all his strength; the train drew away so brutally that heads collided with one another at all the open windows, without any respect for the hierarchy of plumes and pinions.

  For several weeks, there was no news of the army, the probable situation of which was calculated day by day and hour by hour. Finally, a telegram from General Foiraubilles announced that a first engagement had just taken place in the northern section of the Niger bend. Details were lacking, but it was evidently a victory.

  Events followed one another with an extraordinary rapidity and in the early days of March, Haricot VII, surrounded in his capital, Cirajoum with all his warriors, accepted the decision of the arbiters who declared his army completely destroyed.

  The French, therefore, entered Cirajoum; they found the shoulder-blades of the two Marseillais suspended in Haricot VII’s dining room. The officer charged with unhooking the funereal remains, with great ceremony, discovered an inscription on each of them in Negro verse, which an interpreter translated as:

  These bones were covered with the delectable meat

  Which the great Haricot VII was pleased to eat.

  All the cannibals filed before the remains of the feast so flatteringly commemorated, and nothing further remained than to regulate officially the consequences of the war and the losses on either side.

  On the black side, there were vastly more than the complete annihilation, since Haricot VII had only been able to raise two thousand warriors and the French could have killed four hundred thousand.

  In conformity with the treaties, the dead had to be disarmed and dressed in long white robes, but as His Majesty Haricot VII’s subject were completely ignorant of the use of garments, it was agreed that the negroes would limit themselves to painting themselves from head to toe with ceruse, of which French commerce would have the sole right of supply.9

  It remained to individualize the white losses—which is to say, those suffered by our army.

  Under the eyes of the scrutineers sent by all the Powers, forty thousand slips representing all the combatants, without exception—from the commanding general to the humblest infantryman—were put into a giant urn.

  The regulations demanded that the draw by made by the innocent hands of a virgin canteen-waitress. The expeditionary force had kept two of them in reserve. They had engaged specially after an exceedingly scrupulous medical examination, and a surgeon-major first class had been specifically designated to watch over the integrity of their virtue.

  Respectful of the rights of seniority, General Foiraubilles designated to represent chance the older of the two canteen-waitresses, but at the last moment, the young person in question confessed to having yielded to a corporal in the engineering corps during the night that followed the taking of Cirajoum. Her comrade, a petite blonde, blushing at so much honor, was, in consequence, led to the urn.

  The first slip was opened; Captain Sylphe called out the serial number, ad a zouave emerged from the ranks. He was dead! He shouted “Vive la France!” twice and “Vive la République!” once, and in the midst of the acclamations of his brothers in arms, put on a long white smock fitted with a hood, which General Foiraubilles pulled up personally over the head of the dauntless soldier.

  The second slip designated a brigadier in the dragoons. Captain Sylphe ordered the man to dismount from his horse, but the latter, with his right hand level with his helmet, claimed that a cavalryman ought to die on his horse. A discussion was engaged between the ambassadors present, which was threatening to take on the proportions of a veritable quarrel when the Marquis de Foiraubilles made the very apt observation that the French dragoons are a mixed corps, fighting on foot as well as on horseback. The brigadier resigned himself to not being an equestrian cadaver, and put on his smock, shouting his regimental number.

  Captain Sylphe announced that he was going to proceed with the draw for the fate of the wounded, when the English delegate, with perfect phlegm, pointed out that by applying the reckoning tables, in view of the number of their two thousand combatants, individually producing a one-ninth of a per cent mortality, still had the right to the death of a fraction of a Frenchman.

  A Russian colonel pointed out the recurrence of that fraction, but in vain; it was necessary to yield to the obstinacy of the subject of His Most Gracious Majesty King Edward VII. It was agreed, however, that the case would be submitted to the appreciation of an international tribunal; in the meantime, the casualty, afflicted with regard to an indefinite part of his person, would assume a condition of provisional death.

  The virgin hand of the young canteen-worker handed a third slip to Captain Sylph. The latter unfolded it and, tragically, handed it to General Foiraubilles, saying: General, I die for my country! Vive la France!”

  “Vive la France!” repeated the vanquisher of Haricot VII, mechanically. Then, pulling himself together, he said: “My dear Sylphe, you shall be my son in law regardless. You’re only provisionally dead!”

  The British officer made the observation that Captain Sylphe need not put on the uniform of the deceased, but that it was indispensable that he adopt some distinctive mark. A gray dust-cover proposed by an American warrior won a unanimous vote. General Marquis de Foiraubilles enveloped his future son-in-law in it personally; the latter brandished his saber, swearing in an assured masculine voice to conduct himself officially as a dead man in all the circumstances of life, until a definition decision had been reached in his case.

  The drawing of lots for the wounded and the nature of their wounds was free of any incident. Two artillerymen were deprived of the use of their right arms, six infantrymen lost their left legs, a sergeant in the cuirassiers received
a wound in his lower back and an adjutant in the spahis paid for the glory of having defeated Haricot VII with an ear.

  With its dead and wounded at the head, the French army returned to France; the Chambres voted all the necessary funds to celebrate General Foiraubilles and his harvesters of laurels worthily.

  At Marseilles, in the midst of an indescribable enthusiasm, the shoulder-blades so gloriously recaptured were deposited with great pomp in the expiatory monument that the old Phocean city had erected to its unfortunate children.

  With pride, the funeral oration pronounced by the Maire repeated the laudatory lines:

  These bones were covered with the delectable meat

  Which the great Haricot VII was pleased to eat.

  A woman who had searched in vain for her son in the triumphal cortege cried out for him loudly. A staff officer went to her, reproaching her for her antipatriotic conduct, and added that there were six thousand mothers whose sons had also died of disease during the campaign. As the unhappy woman continued to moan and utter imprecations, a courageous citizen grabbed her by the throat to make her shut up. When his fingers relaxed their grip, the woman collapsed. She was dead.

  An engineer of the P.L.M. Company had had the good idea of establishing metallic armatures on top of the locomotive and carriages making up the train of honor responsible for carrying General de Foiraubilles to Paris, which had been garnished at the last moment with flowers and foliage. Thus, the train seemed to run from Marseilles to Paris beneath an uninterrupted triumphal arch.

  Everything had been calculated so that the victorious army would make its entrance on the first of September, the first anniversary of the Petitpaon Era.

  The President of the Republic had claimed the privilege of taking center stage himself in the first apotheosis of his work.

  Desirous above all of making it something original as well as beautiful, he had decided on the Place de la Concorde as its theater. The ordinary and extraordinary organizers of public celebrations had applauded the presidential choice, without the slightest hidden agenda of flattery. The name of the location was, in fact, a radiant symbol, concord being synonymous with peace in a rigorously exact fashion, and like peace itself, the result of an evolution as long as it was bloody, that corner of the Earth had been subject to many transformations. It had seen the hideous guillotine cause to fall, pell-mell, along with heads guilty of crimes, those circled with royal crowns and the heroic heads of those who had slaughtered one another in the dazzle of the first radiance of a humanity to which they had given birth.