The young couple fled before that savage manifestation.
In their room, the Duke and Duchess allowed the tears to flow in which dolors drown and hot anger and virile resolution dissolve.
In the middle of the night, the Duke and Duchess, holding hands, left the palace. As everyone was asleep and they were walking on tiptoe, no one noticed their departure.
Weary of persecution and ill-treatment, the Duke had decided to leave Miellune. The Duchess, as infatuated with her husband as in the early days of their marriage, had succeeded in bending his determination to depart alone; she had obtained his agreement that they would not be separated.
As they went by the Tropheonic Guards rendered them honors and watched them draw away in the direction of the volcanoes. The respect they had for their master extending to the members of his family, they neither exchanged the slightest criticism nor permitted themselves to make any privately.
The next day, at dawn, the Empress was, as was her habit, on sentry duty at the young couple’s bedroom door. She would have considered it as a failure of duty to let a single day go by without insulting her son-in-law, who, forced by the topography of the location to pass that way, could not escape her aggressive matinal demonstrations.
Outside the closed door, the mother-in-law savored the bitter joy of sensing her bile acidify, in order to spring forth more forcefully when her victim appeared.
That day, the wait was neverending. Exasperation shook the Empress with convulsive tremors. Her haggard eyes became bloodshot; foam whitened the corners of her lips; she stimulated herself with menacing gestures.
Finally, in a paroxysm of fury, roaring, she hurled herself against the door that was obstinate in not opening. By deference or weakness, the panel gave way without a shadow of resistance.
The customary “Wretch!” was swallowed by her contracted throat at the sight of the empty bed and the deserted room. She uttered the cry of a famished beast whose pretty has escaped, at the very moment when its fangs sensed the warmth of its flesh.
Then her maternal entrails performed a somersault. “My daughter! My daughter! Where’s my daughter?”
Philémon Sphéroboul, the god-emperor, brought running by the outburst of that racket, stood there mutely, which attracted vehement invective to him.
The tenderness of mothers sometimes occasions brief truces in the ardor of their gendrophobia. The Empress, having become Madame Philémon Sphéroboul, mother of Jenny, once again, asked, breathless with anxiety: “Where are they? Where are they?”
An instantaneous investigation, led by the prime minister in person, furnished the response: the Duke and Duchess had left Miellune during the night and had disappeared into the flames.
The stupor of despair was followed by the need to accomplish important and definitive actions. By means of a few brief questions, the Empress informed herself of the route taken by the fugitives. Turning toward the god-emperor, she said: “Come with me.”
“Where?” Sphéroboul thought he ought to ask.
“To join them. Come on, let’s go!”
The Emperor pronounced blurred fragments of incomprehensible phrases, while his spouse took him by the hand.
In the square, all that Miellune counted of living beings had gathered, or the news of the event had spread from house to house; everyone wanted to see what could not fail to happen.
The god-emperor appeared on the perron. His octagonal top hat, surmounted by the crown, gleamed with countless reflections. His frock-coat had never seemed so solemnly black, nor his waistcoat whiter; as for his trousers, their pearl-gray was mirrored, without a shadow, in the dazzling polish of his shoes. His right hand was supported by his cane—the offering of which he had revoked, in the misfortune that had struck him—and his left hand rested on the folded forearm of the Empress, whose silhouette was drowned by the plats of a long dark veil.
The Tropheonic Guards, assembled by a fanfare of trumpets, in full dress uniform, were arranged in a double row, holding back the curious. Their band played a slow march with muffled sonorities.
The Emperor and Empress, escorted by the prime minister and the dignitaries of the court, filed slowly away. The musicians fell into step behind them, then the troopers, and finally, in disorder, the crowd, with old men with curved backs, and women dragging children hanging on to their skirts or clutching them in their arms against their breast.
It did not occur to anyone to ask where they were going. They all followed their god-emperor because a mysterious force attached their steps to his; it was like an accomplishment of the fatality before which human consciousness is effaced.
And the procession, which was neither a joyful procession nor a sad procession, emerged from the town, serenely, under the giant wing of destiny, its members protecting their eyes from the glare of the sun, whose vertiginous abyss opened directly above their heads.
Philémon Sphéroboul, on his short bowed legs, rolled his formless body toward the unknown of the volcanoes in order to obey his wife, obsessed to the point of the annihilation of her will by the mystery that her child had just penetrated. And that obscure attraction being the human law, on Earth as in Heaven, Miellune, which had been paradise, was changed into a desert in which no breath of life palpitated.
Outside, the worlds had continued to play their parts more or less harmoniously in the concert of universal gravitation. The disappearance of Miellune had captivated public opinion momentarily, but it had not taken long to be impassioned by another event.
When the volcanoes, whose existence was temporary, were extinguished, bold explorers had climbed their craters, raised into mountains. They had found the ruins of the town that had been called Miellune.
By restoring its name, they made it once again a place propitious for the settlement of humans.
The new Miellune, haloed by the aureole of cosmic martyrs, became established as the primary place of pilgrimage for scientists, sterile by nature and consequently happy to objectivize themselves in blind and hazardous reconstitutions.
And life, in the depths of that hollow valley, flourished as before at a point on a plain of infinite horizons.
THE REPUBLICAN JUNGLE
(A typewritten copy of these unsigned pages was found in the Palais Bourbon in the Salon de la Paix, which is frequented by the députés, journalists and a certain number of busy or idle individuals. Nothing allows us to establish the identity of the author. We are publishing his work under the signature Diogène Anonymus. [Editor’s Note])
At the price of indescribable efforts and unspeakable suffering, Humans had obtained complete domination over their eternal companion, Nature.
Intoxicated by their victory, they exploited the activity of the slave—who, when she was free, had kept redoubtable occult forces at bay—to the point of exhaustion.
Sensing their liberation, slyly, in a slow but obstinate revolt, those forces rose up against humans, gradually eroding and crumbling the imperious block of their sovereignty. Surprised, humans lowered their eyes interrogatively toward Nature. She, as of old, before humanity had invented the languages of the present day, replied to humankind:
“What folly, my master, was yours! Have we not been forged to fuse our double existence into one alone? Was I not your eternal ally? Had our fidelity not been marked with an unbreakable seal? Side by side, have we not struggled against our common enemies, the elements? Has not each of their defeats circled your head with a new crown? Without jealousy, have I not glorified myself in your triumphs? Why, when the list was closed and the goals of which you had dreamed ceased to be tangible, did you turn the thrust of your genius against me? Your cruelties surpassed dementia: you have afflicted me to the extent of my partial destruction. Now the elements, confronted my by death-throes, are fomenting their revenge against you. My brother, I beg you, let me forgive you for your ingratitude. Hold out our hands to me. Lift me up again. Stem the blood flowing from my wounds. The life that you can render me, I will employ in its totali
ty for your defense against the enmity of the elements.”
Thus was revealed the religion of the revival of Nature. Being utilitarian and making a complete abstraction of the entities usually appointed to reign over souls—which is to say, not offering any competition to the multiple enterprises already created with regard to the afterlife, the new religion, without demanding a single martyr, came close to drowning at its birth in the delirious enthusiasm of its first devotees.
Of the ministerial cells that form the great administrative hive, that of Agriculture is especially consecrated to the relationships established between the Government of the Republic and Nature. The politics of the moment, combined with the personality of the Minister in office, incessantly modified the exercise of the tacit concordat.
The agricultural superintendent serves as the master of arms of the important families in the bureaucratic divisions of the three kingdoms. He holds the Almanach de Gotha of the great species. He is the one who, without appeal, consecrates the nobility of fur, feather and scale. By his order, horses, bovines, pigs and sheep figure in the golden book of breeding. Under his control he holds poultry, fish, birds, and even the silkworm. His role is to whiten lilies, gild wheat and blacken truffles. The world of vegetables is submissive to his recognition. In accordance with his will, he makes and breaks the amorous careers of stallions. With a sign he exalts or debases the trees of forests. He reigns in full authority, fattening the souls of penguins where they slumber, far away.
In the course of the present year, one of the most fortunate with which the Third republic has provided the French people, relations between the Minister of Agriculture and Nature have been very cordial, in spite the fact, that the harvests over the major part of the territory, as happens every year, have heavily inclined toward deficit. Because the earth has suffered, by turns, aridity and excess of water, the fruits have not kept the promises of the flowers.
The evil, always in the process of becoming chronic, is known in its source and its cause. It only remains to find the practical remedy and its application.
If Agriculture lacks strong arms, the Chambre des Députés is extremely rich in orators promised to rustic labor. An oratory instrument, late but arriving vigorously, speech has dethroned the plow.
For several years, the group of the “Laborers of the Palais Bourbon” had for its president and founder the honorable Parisian depute Philémon Singeoreille.26 The Marais quarter knew the hazard of having given him birth. Until his twentieth year came round, the Parisian fidelity of Philémon Singeoreille had been total; never, in body or mind, had he crossed the fortifications. The exigencies of conscription dispatched him to a banal southern sub-prefecture, all of whose houses, including the barracks, lived cheek by jowl with the countryside, detailed in gardens, cultivated fields, woods or meadows.
Parisians are curious by nature. Military life has its leisures. Philémon Singeoreille consecrated his to discovering Nature, of which the first sight had struck him at a distance with stupefaction.
He wrote enthusiastic accounts of it to his relatives and friends. His destiny determined that he should only encounter incredulity. No one responded to the challenge of “Come and see!” with which he slapped skeptics when he first went home on leave. In the regiment, his companions considered him with bewilderment. He received pressing and reiterated injunctions from his superiors to cease his simulation of a native imbecility or an acquired cerebral derangement.
Following the example of a few other human beings, Philémon Singeoreille had a soul. That soul was the soul of an apostle. It supported reproaches and mockery with an unshakeable calm.
When the hour of his liberation arrived, Philémon Singeoreille’s first civilian action took the form of an announcement to his father and mother of his engagement to a young country girl encountered in the course of a rural exploration.
“Why not a foreigner?” asked Père Singeoreille, indignantly, who, in his anger—that of a Parisian wounded in the most intimate fiber of his pride—transformed into Gallo-Roman subsoil his shop selling porcelain and faience, until then run with a sacrosanct tenderness conjointly with his spouse, whose more conservative fury, if it spared plates and jugs, was no less demonstrative with regard to a project that was provincial to a point beyond implausibility.
Young Philémon, with his filial hands, had helped his authors pick up the debris of the victims of their imperative manifestations, after which he had persisted so heroically in his determination that, a few months later, after the civil and religious formalities, he installed his wife in the porcelain and faience shop, scrupulously dusted for the occasion.
The parents quickly laid down their arms before their rural daughter-in-law, who glorified the prestige of the capital by a perpetual widening of both eyes. The Singeoreille spouses conceived a personal pride on that basis. Moved by a praiseworthy sentiment of reciprocity, they lent such an indulgent ear to Philémon’s stories that the following summer, taking advantage of the sequential days of the National Festival, both couples embarked for the destination of the minuscule subprefecture that had initiated Philémon.
The latter’s spouse took pride in doing the honors of the familial domain for her in-laws. Gradually, she abandoned herself to the customary sentiments, and blushed discreetly on going into her maidenly bedroom with her husband. She showed the Parisians around the barns, the poultry-yard and the stables, but the second day constrained her to renounce, for lack of strength, taking part in the frenetic races that precipitated them from the woods to the vineyards via the ploughed fields and the meadows.
Philémon, alone, paused for a few moments to suffer, without letting too much impotence show, the reproaches of his mother-in-law, offended at not retaining the attention of her visitors to a greater extent.
Even superalimented by excitement, human strength has its limits. They were close to being reached when the third of the days of leave was completed. The last express train saw the Singeoreilles collapse on to its banquettes, reduced to the state of parcels improbably compressed by the excess of a customary crowd always very safely anticipated. In a slumber neighboring on turpitude, the neophytes of nature smiled blissfully at the jolts of the train.
The next day, the shop of the Golden Salad Bowl raised its shutter again, in accordance with a habit that went back to Louis-Philippe. In spite of appearances, however, there was no longer an identity between the past and the present; the Singeoreilles had been possessed by Nature. They no longer talked about anything but her, even to their clients. All their thoughts were of her. That possession became so complete that one morning, Père Singeoreille, embracing the porcelain and faience with a scornful gesture, asked his wife this question:
“Isn’t this transformation of the earth into basins and salad bowls a crime? Does man have the right to inflict sterility on what nature has conceived to give birth to plants and trees?”
Mère Singeoreille replied with a long gaze of negative anguish.
The old shopkeepers did not take long to confess their desire to retire to the bosom of nature as soon as “the little ones” had acquired sufficient experience. In the meantime, they begged their son’s pardon every day for having so grossly and so unjustly misunderstood him. They reread the first letters he had written as a soldier, tearfully.
In such a favorable atmosphere, Philémon’s proselytizing zeal was revived. It was urged on by his family that the heir presumptive of the Golden Salad Bowl reappeared in the neighborhood café. The proprietress, with whom he had entertained, concurrently with the other regulars, a platonic flirtation, welcome him with a moist gaze and recommended, in the finesse of her taste, a new aperitif liqueur.
Under our sky, less clement than that of ancient Hellas, the estaminet replaces the Agora. Orators gripped by the disease of eloquence find a podium there with ever-ready echoes. There is no question of a political, military or social order that can resist definitive demonstrations registered in black pencil on marble table-tops
.
More often than not, victory in multiquotidian card games constitutes the sole recompense of these benevolent legislators, but it sometimes happens that their audiences send them, furnished with regular powers, to sit in a representative assembly in which their universal ignorance soon takes on the allure of infallible doctrine.
Three years in the café established Philémon Singeoreille as a candidate. His associates, having become his disciples, grouped around him as a committee. At their head, in the very heart of the capital, Philémon Singeoreille deployed the standard of Nature, of whom he proclaimed himself the pioneer of regeneration.
The enthusiasm of the quarter crystallized in the foundation of the “Circle of Laborers,” every member taking an oath to employ body and soul for the election of Philémon Singeoreille. A minuscule plow, schematically tattooed on the palm of the right hand, commemorated the solemnity of the oath and constituted an infallible sign of solidarity.
A few months later, on the occasional of a partial election, the name of Philémon Singeoreille, multiplied by the unanimity of citizens qualified to nominate a député, emerged from the urns.
The victorious “laborers” led their elected representative to the Palais Bourbon in procession. The people of Paris cheered them. Neophytes spontaneously joined their ranks. Believing it to be a revolutionary demonstration, the guards on duty closed the gates of the Palais. The concierge opened them wide again to Philémon Singeoreille on the mute presentation of the plow inscribed in the palm of his right hand.
An indescribable ovation saluted his entry into the hall of sessions. The fresh hatchling of universal suffrage went to his bench under the indicative smile of the ushers responsible for the bodily separation of honorable gentlemen on days of parliamentary tempests. Applause was born of hands too distant to shake his as he passed by. As soon as he was seated, the President wished him an admiring welcome, congratulating the miraculous coincidence of his appearance with the precise moment when discussion was commencing of a projected law intended to ordain means appropriate to endure the refurbishment of forests, the dearest question of all to Nature’s servant knights.
The Petitpaon Era Page 26