The Petitpaon Era

by Henri Austruy

  The very idea of death, as a natural term of existence, was lost, and no one was astonished when the Bishop declared that the mere fact of living in paradise conceded immortality.

  Weeks, months and years went by in that inalterable and quiet immobility. Everyone remained identical to himself, without aging in body or in thought. There no longer being any death, no births occurred. The word “desire” had lost all significance and no one would have been able to respond to the provocation of the formulation of one.

  Philémon I had exhausted the secret provisions a long time ago. He did not even retain the notion of regret, for his alcoholic delirium had followed the laws of eternity, which made him drunk and stuffed forever.

  Time had become an expression of which scientists, ever the victims of their mania for explaining the inexplicable, tried in vain the reconstitute the meaning.

  They had also attempted to establish a scientific demonstration of the nutritive value of the volcanoes. Radioactivity, they said, is an essential and constitutive property of all bodies. Its intensity varies naturally from one body to another. It constitutes, in a way, the soul of matter. That soul radiates around it activities that condense into emanation.

  Chemists described the properties of the emanation, which presents itself in the state of a gas whose existence is recognized in mineral waters and, in very great quantity, in the vapors issuing from craters. That emanation reacts by exterior contact to produce new substances. It is thus that argon results from the action of the emanation on water, lithium and neon from the reaction of the emanation on a salt of copper.

  Reacting upon the carbon dioxide in the air, the emanation produces tropheon, the nourishing—or, rather, dynamogenic—properties of which are such that all aliments become unnecessary to the organism that breathes it. However, experiments established that tropheon, remaining in the state of a gas mixed with the air, is only capable of repairing the losses of organisms, without ever being able to impart any growth or any augmentation of weight. Thus was unveiled the mystery of the immutability of the human body.

  It was then that an audacious mind had conceived the project of polymerizing the tropheon into a liquid, the nutritive energy of which would be so greatly multiplied that its absorption would cause growth and fattening. The laboratory work had not yet given any result, and the tropheon was obstinate in remaining diffusely faithful to the atmosphere, in spite of the charming name of bouloteon that the chemist had promised it on the day on which it consented to liquefy in some flask or other.

  The prime minister had thought it his duty not to hide these attempts from his master. Philémon I was transported to the scientist’s domicile. With a furious whirling of his inseparable cane he had broken flasks and retorts in order to put an immediate stop to the experiments, which he declared to be a threat to the security of paradise.

  Time, which is only one of the innumerable aspects of the relative, is annihilated in the bosom of eternity, a simple reflection of the absolute. In consequence, only a god, enjoying the plenitude of his faculties, would have been able to say whether it was years or centuries that the inhabitants of Miellune saw file past in days and nights, the black and white squares of the chessboard of the inconceivable.

  The fact is that no one attempted the impossibility of delimiting the limitless. With forceful oaths, the emperor enjoined those measurers of the infinite to put away their measuring-sticks and respect his desire to live in tranquility, without seeking a quarrel with an unknown from which only nasty surprises could be expected.

  Past, present and future, in confusion, reigned with an unfailing authority that identified beings and things to themselves. Existence was a bottomless lake without shores, with a motionless and polished surface, like a mirror in which the skies were reflected.

  Images being a reality with as much entitlement as the objects that give birth to them, and as the sky is not imagined as desert of a god, Miellune promised its emperor that summit. Philémon Sphéroboul installed himself there without vertigo, totalizing his nudity by removing his crown, which he gave to his son-in-law. His cane alone remained among the attributes of his terrestrial power; in order to enhance its power, he forbade his subjects—even the lame—to make use of such an instrument.

  Apart from that restriction, everyone enjoyed liberty to the extent of the most extreme fantasies. Their full exercise found all the more facility because, all needs being suppressed, their satisfaction did not require the slightest effort or give rise to the shadow of an anxiety.

  Amour, having no objective, had thus fallen into desuetude. Men and women lived side by side without desiring one another. Assorted couples exalted their tenderness by absorbing themselves in a reciprocal motionless and mute contemplation.

  Hunger was perpetually sated by the inspiration of tropheon, so obsession with the pleasures of the table had been so radically abolished that no taste-bud was able to evoke the slightest memory.

  Voyages, the object of which is to go in search of unprecedented sensations by means of the frequentation of new horizons, had lost their essential value, for even madness, which is one of the poles of human reason, would be unable to displace itself infinitely.

  Thanks to the suppression of these difficulties, money, the habitual notation of the difficulties of relationship between human beings, did not attract the slightest attention.

  As for dreams, in the bosom of which flowers stillborn of the exiles from Earth might have bloomed, like vacillating bouquets in the mouths of chimeras, weary of cradling their own reality, they had been extinguished to the last drowsy echo.

  Thus lived Miellune.

  Thanks to Sphéroboul, it had entered into eternity.

  Thanks to him, it was to emerge therefrom.

  One day, the god-emperor, in one of the rooms of the palace, found himself face to face with an individual who was holding a cane in his right hand. He was identical to him in every respect: the same implausibly developed abdomen, held up by similarly-curved short legs, like him in a state of complete nudity.

  Philémon Sphéroboul did not intend to be disobeyed. The sight of that cane irritated him. He spoke sharply to the intruder, who made no reply, although his mouth opened, articulating words composed of the same syllables as those he heard.

  “I’ll teach your mute tongue to speak!” the god-emperor howled—and he raised his cane. The other cane made the same gesture, simultaneously. Frightened, Sphéroboul threw himself backwards. Gripped by a twin fear, his adversary also recoiled. That retreat emboldened Sphéroboul. He stared at the temeritous individual, who did not lower his eyes in response.

  Suddenly, furiously, he cried: “The wretch isn’t content to carry a cane! My word, he’s fatter than me!”

  Buffeted by a murderous jealousy, he dipped his head in order to charge—but that abrupt movement broke his equilibrium; his abdomen dragged the rest of his body to the floor.

  Painful efforts brought him back to his knees.

  He was alone.

  “He’s gone!” he observed, reassured. And his eyes, certain of not encountering the enemy, paraded around with satisfaction.

  Suddenly, he uttered a cry: “There he is coming back! He’s crawling toward me, the traitor!”

  The emperor stood up, attentively following the movements of his adversary, whose heaviness made him anxious. At the same instant, they found themselves on the semicircle of their short legs. Then closing his eyes, Sphéroboul launched himself forward, cane raised. The blow made such a racket that Philémon Sphéroboul fell unconscious after having shouted: “I’ve killed him!”

  When he came to, before having recognized his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law, who had come to his aid, he repeated: “I’ve killed him! That’ll teach him to be fatter than me! I’ve killed him!”

  The Empress and the Duchess of Miellune tried in vain to explain to him that he had not killed anyone and that he had only broken a mirror, which was his strict right as emperor and god. As the Duk
e of Miellune did not appear to be giving a sufficiently enthusiastic approval to that license, however, his imperial mother-in-law snapped at him violently: “Naturally, you don’t agree with me, good-for-nothing!” And she told him that if he persisted in not rendering her a grandmother, she would repudiate him and expel him from the family.

  Under that threat, the unfortunate son-in-law looked at his wife, lowered his head and made no reply.

  Philémon Sphéroboul went to bed with a delirious fever of the worst sort. He summoned his minister and said to him: “My dear prime and only minister, go right away to that scientist who was manufacturing bouloteon. I need bouloteon—a lot of bouloteon—because I want to get fatter, so fat that no one can dream of being as fat as me!”

  When the minister gave his august master an assurance that his plumpness would always be unequaled, Sphéroboul stopped him and said, bitterly: “You’re saying that to flatter me; that’s what a good servant does. I thank you for that delicate thought, but I’ve already found a rival. I killed him.” And he narrated the scene of the encounter.

  The scientist, who had been continuing his experiments in secret, had just obtained the result that he had been seeking for such a long time at the very moment when the minister, the bearer of the imperial will, arrived at his home. A small round-bottomed flask had ended up half-full of a liquid that was surely bouloteon. The honest and devoted minister brought it back in all haste to his master.

  The latter emptied it in a single draught and, getting out of bed, went to sit down in front of a mirror in order to give himself the joy of following the assimilatory progress of his digestion.

  Alas, how frightened he was when he saw the skin of his belly, so shiny and so taut, wither and wrinkle like the rind of a fruit from which the vital sap has been removed.

  He howled that he had been poisoned. Weeping, begging, apologizing for having taken the title of god, he offered his cane in sacrifice against the certainty of the salvation of his life.

  In order to escape a just punishment, the scientist, the author of the terrible mistake, had fled Miellune like a madman, and when an attempt was made to catch up with him in order to take possession of his person, he was seen to disappear into the flames.

  The Bishop ordered public lamentations in honor of the god-emperor, whose person, in the wake of that unfortunate ingestion of false bouloteon, had diminished by fifteen pounds.

  Not daring to annul the holocaust of his cane, Sphéroboul had taken the imperial crown back from his son-in-law.

  That loss of fifteen pounds had plunged him into a black depression. He sat motionless in an armchair, his desolate eyes staring at his abdomen, whose wrinkles denounced the internal catastrophe. The shame of showing himself in that pitiful state was such that he did not leave the palace, in spite of the exhortations of his family, who feared that an even greater diminution might result from that regime of claustration.

  The prime minister eventually vanquished his master’s resistance by proving to him that the palace, by virtue of its central situation, which made it the point most distant from the volcanoes, was the location poorest in tropheon. Philémon Sphéroboul consented to go to respire the richer atmosphere that his health demanded.

  As much out of personal vanity as pride in his rank, he did not want to show his sickly body to his subjects; he asked his wife for his clothes.

  To the general bewilderment, he appeared in a black frock-coat, peal-gray trousers and a white waistcoat. By virtue of a reminiscence of his sumptuary tastes, infallible in determining the harmony of a costume, he put on his octagonal top hat again. Solemn and dignified, he went out of Miellune every day to take his tropheon cure.

  An example set at such a high level could not fail to be imitated. As if by enchantment, the fashion of getting dressed returned. Soon, even partial nudity was first decreed to be ridiculous, and did not take long to become a fault giving rise to severe criticism.

  The physicians decided to resume their forgotten role; they prescribed tropheon cures. There were regimes to follow day and night. The prescription specified the exact distance of the volcanoes at which patients had to station themselves, the distance naturally being proportional to the energy of the treatment.

  But jealousy did not take long to awaken in the heart of the god-emperor. Fearing that he might see the tropheon profiting one of his subjects more than himself, he declared it his exclusive property and forbade anyone to leave Miellune in order to go in search of it. He graciously surrendered that which could be obtained within the walls, reserving the rest for his personal use.

  Most things only have value by virtue of the difficulties that surround their possession. Solely by virtue of its prohibition, the exterior tropheon acquired an immediate and tyrannical importance. Procuring it became the unique and constant goal of everyone.

  In order to attain it, the old instincts surged forth one by one from their immemorial slumber. Guided by the intelligence acquired in the course of ages consumed, they put themselves at the service of renascent appetites.

  There were ingenious and stubborn ruses designed to deceive Sphéroboul’s surveillance, the latter having been advised by his minister to recall to activity the soldiers formerly sacked because of their flagrant lack of utility. They mounted guard around Miellune and tried to drive back the tropheon thieves by force. As they were permitted to breathe while they were on sentry duty, the tropheon thus abandoned to them constituted an inestimable salary.

  The prime minister had spoken to his master very truthfully, for everyone wanted to be a soldier in order to breathe the famous tropheon at closer range.

  By way of precaution and to leave the greatest margin possible to a fattening morally prejudicial to his own person, the emperor-king made the selection from his subjects in order of thinness. The first who had the honor of taking the title of Tropheonic Guard was a skeletal individual whose bones were obviously near neighbors of his skin.

  The uniforms of presphéroboulian times—to employ the term consecrated by the emperor-king, desirous of fixing the consequence of his advent—were exhumed, and proclaimed the bellicose cacophonies of their colors very loudly.

  The Tropheonic Guards, having sworn an oath to ensure without weakness and distraction the accomplishment of the imperial will, showed an inflexible rigor. Men, women and children obtained no mercy from them. Brutally, they were driven back inside when they tried to reach the forbidden zone.

  Attempts at corruption failed; violence against the soldiers was punished by imprisonment a location devoid of air, and consequently deprived of tropheon. That detention made the convicts thinner, which exasperated their desire. Recidivism became so frequent that the number of prisoners threatened to surpass that of their guardians.

  By virtue of conjugal weakness, the emperor-king granted the capricious whims of the empress, who first demanded of her son-in-law interminable sessions even closer to the volcanoes than the most radical regime that would have been prescribed by the physician least careful of the life of his client.

  The Duke of Miellune had obeyed without a murmur, because he respected his mother-in-law even in thought. The latter, observing that the tropheon cure in question was not leading her to the status of grandmother, to which she aspired more ardently every day, embarked on the martyrdom of her son-in-law. The god-emperor blindly made himself the humble artisan of that process.

  Successively, the Duke saw himself stripped of several of his prerogatives, of which the principal one, immediately placed before that of wearing an entirely gilded uniform, was being able to leave Miellune day and night and approach the volcanoes in complete liberty.

  Of bourgeois descent, the empress would have thought it in poor taste to reveal the intestinal dissents of the family to the people, so the Duke continued to wear his entirely gilded uniform and enjoy the right to walk outside the town. His shrewd mother-in-law contented herself with having him put in charge of the palace dungeons. That appointment only permitted
him to leave the subterrains during the hours of night consecrated to sleep.

  Every evening, the Duke rejoined the Duchess, and, under the angry gaze of the Empress, went back to their apartment with her. As the rarefied air of the subterrains did not sustain him sufficiently, he spent his nights on the balcony soliciting the tropheon he lacked. In the meantime, the Duchess bewailed her solitude in the depths of her alcove.

  To her mother, who interrogated her regarding her red eyes, the Duchess replied evasively, but the Empress out her finger on the truth in concluding, disdainfully: “Your husband is like your father. All men are alike!” And before descending to his post, the Duke was subjected to a scene in which the least flattering epithets and insults were offered to him in profusion.

  One evening, he came back pale, his eyes cold and his brow furrowed.

  Frightened by that expression, which was unfamiliar to her, the poor Duchess asked her husband: “Are you ill?”

  “No,” he replied, somber and bleak.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I’ve just decided to kill your mother, and your father too.”

  “Why?”

  “Your mother, because she’s a nasty woman. Your father, because he’s her husband. That’s it.”

  “Duke, you mustn’t do that.”

  “Duchess, you know very well that I don’t want to cause you any pain. If you insist, I won’t kill the nasty woman or her husband.”

  The Duchess took the Duke in her arms and embraced him recklessly. The Empress came in and caught sight of that effusion, of the cause of which she was unaware.

  “How stupid you are, my poor child, to throw the flowers of your tenderness in the face of that...” She searched for the name of the animal synthetic of all physical and moral flaws, but as it had disappeared from Miellune and its memory, going back to presphéroboulian times, had been effaced, the Megaera was unable to find the evocative syllable. She concluded her sentence by spitting on the floor and stamping on the saliva furiously.