There is no way to describe the sensations that the scientist experienced. As they drew further away from the earth, one might have thought that his soul separated itself, disengaging itself from its original clay and freeing itself from the bonds of his body. An indescribable well-being penetrated every part of him; a gentle warmth enlivened him; his mind worked powerfully; he forgot all his misery, all his suffering, all his mundane humiliations. He was finally himself!
Around him sparkled a kind of light that resembled an opaline gleam. Above his head extended the immensity of the azure of the heavens. Beneath his feet the earth was retreating and the horizon slowly became more distinct. The rivers presented all their sinuosities simultaneously; the houses and villas seemed to spring from the bosom of the earth; the sea extended in the distance like a vast sheet of silk, stirred by the wind; the fields displayed their golden escutcheons, quartered in green and purple; the forests covered vast expanses with their somber mantle; people were no more than little dots moving hither and yon, vain and imperceptible dust! Then again, there was no sound and no movement around the aerial voyagers. A profound, absolute silence! Not the bleak and somber silence of human solitudes but a silence that was, so to speak, melodious. It seemed to them that the distant harmonies of the celestial worlds were about to reach their terrestrial ears.
While Ludwig concentrated on these new and sublime impressions, Bitorff, to whom they were familiar, managed the aerostat and devoted himself to various experiments whose program he had organized with his companion before leaving the earth. When his calculations informed him that they were at an altitude of six hundred meters, he told Ludwig; the latter shivered, for the aeronaut’s voice burst forth with supernatural force, and had nothing human about it. Meanwhile, the atmosphere was beginning to get chilly. The ineffable wellbeing that Klopstock had experienced was succeeded by a period of icy cold. Bitorff’s voice lost its marvelous vibration. A hum began to deafen their ears. They were at twelve hundred meters.
Ten minutes later, Ludwig thought he could make out an almost-unintelligible murmur. He tried to ask Bitorff whether it might originate from speech addressed to him. To his great surprise, he could not hear his own voice at all, and he had to make great efforts that wearied his lungs and throat to proffer his question.
“We’re two thousand meters above the earth,” Bitorff finally managed to make him understand. “The expansion of the hydrogen gas contained in the balloon, which has been increasing since we left the ground, has now reached such an extent that I’m obliged to open the valve. Otherwise, the envelope of our vehicle would burst under the strain.”
Meanwhile, a thick veil, similar to one of the heavy mists that sometimes expand over the earth during a thaw, obscuring and darkening entire cities with their noxious shroud, spread over the earth. It ended up concealing everything from the voyagers’ eyes. Soon, dull roaring sounds rumbled in the distance below the balloon. Terrible noises burst forth. Broad lighting-flashes hurled their fiery wings through the chaos. Flamboyant serpents of lightning launched forth in all directions.
There was something terrifying about that revolution of the elements, seen and heard by two men who were only sustained in mid-air by a frail piece of taffeta inflated by a little hydrogen. Bitorff felt fear grip his heart, but Ludwig experienced a sort of savage joy. He laughed strangely; he clapped his hands; he jumped up and down. One might have thought him the spirit of tempests, in the midst of his accursed triumph.
The balloon was still rising, by virtue of a regular movement completely imperceptible to those it was lifting. The storm ended up by no longer being anything more than a mute black dot beneath their feet. That dot gradually dissipated and disappeared. The earth showed itself again, but confused. One could still distinguish, with great attention, roads like black threads and rivers like tresses of silver and gold. Above the aeronauts, the sky was resplendent with a serenity of which the earthbound can have no inkling, even on the highest mountains. Its azure took on a deep blue tint, which declined towards the lower regions into a greenish hue.
“Four thousand meters!” shouted Bitorff’s voice, beginning to recover its strength, to his companion, who was numbed by a violent cold.
That voice burst forth in deafening vibrations a quarter of an hour later, when it announced: “Six thousand meters!”
Nothing was any longer visible on the earth but large masses. Bitorff threw into the air two birds that he had brought on the balloon. The poor creatures extended their wings to take flight, but they fell like leaden masses; their air, too rarefied, could no longer lend them support. Ludwig’s respiration became more difficult; his chest was oppressed, chilled by the cold—and yet he felt excited by a feverish agitation. His heart was beating rapidly, his breathing accelerated. Two birds and a rabbit that still remained in the gondola began to choke, and were not long in dying for lack of viable air.
“Eight thousand meters,” said Bitorff.5
His voice had become dull again, and with a gesture he showed Ludwig that nothing any longer remained beneath their feet. The earth and the clouds had disappeared; the immensity of space surrounded the balloon in every direction. As for the cold, it was intolerable. Their shallow breath was scarcely sufficient for the conservation of animal warmth. Blood leaked from the eyes, nostrils and ears of the audacious duo; their words were inaudible. The balloon, the only object they could see, seemed about to expire, so impetuously was the hydrogen gas escaping. Beneath them, the blue of the sky; above, strange and unknown darkness, through which the stars projected a light deprived of scintillation, which had something funereal about it. There ended physical nature. There were located the impenetrable barriers imposed by God on human audacity.
The gas condensed, and the balloon ceased climbing.
“Master,” said Bitorff to Klopstock, “if we don’t want to die, let’s make haste to descend to earth! You can see it: the divine hand has written in terrible letters: ‘Thou shalt go no further.’ But what are you doing? Have you lost your mind? What! You’re throwing out our ballast! You’re taking off your clothes!”
“Because I want to go further!” cried Ludwig, enthusiastically. “Yes, I want to cross the barriers imposed on humankind. Look! The balloon, free of all ballast, is still rising; let’s break the gondola, hang on to the cords and reach the heavens!”
He began to put this plan into operation. Bitorff launched himself toward the valve and opened it, in spite of the despairing efforts of his companion. The balloon descended; the air gradually became less cold as they arrived in less elevated atmospheric layers. The earth reappeared beneath them, initially as an indistinct gray mass; then it gradually took on a more precise form. Its rivers and roads became visible, details reappeared, people and animals increased in size . . . and the balloon finally touched down about two leagues from Hamburg.
Bitorff exploded in transports of joy.
Ludwig Klopstock wept with rage and disappointment. “We could have gone into the darkness of infinity!” he repeated to his companion.
“We would have perished!” the latter replied.
Without paying the slightest attention to the delight of the crowd that surrounded the two courageous voyagers and lavished applause upon them, without replying to members of the Hamburg Academy, who were imploring him to write a memoir on what he had observed and experienced, without even shaking the hand of his companion in peril, Ludwig drew away silently, climbed back on his horse, and rode back to Altona without stopping.
There, he bought large quantities of gummed fabric, loaded his purchases on to the rump of his horse, and shut himself up in his little house in Oltenzen, from which he did not emerge for an entire month. No one was able to see him during that retreat—not the farm laborers, nor a deputation from the Academy of Hamburg, nor even the village pastor. He did not even deign to reply to them though the door, which he refused to open. Were it not for the walk he took with his wife toward nightfall, and a few purchases of food, he might have been thou
ght to be lying dead in his house.
Needless to say, this mysterious retreat gave rise to many strange suppositions. Some favored the hypothesis that Ludwig had lost his reason during his aerial excursion, others that he was devoting himself to a work of magic. The latter belief was not entirely implausible, for it was eventually discovered that Klopstock was building a strangely-shaped machine, which resembled a fish armed with large oars similar to fins; they were moved by means of a mechanism of cogwheels that was both simple and admirable.
That judgment became possible one morning when the inhabitants of Oltenzen saw Ludwig in mid-air, seated on his huge fish, maneuvering it more easily than a horseman guides a docile horse. In spite of the violence of contrary winds, he steered it to the right and the left, forwards and backwards, up and down. He finished by descending into his courtyard, so tightly that the two ends of the machine almost touched the sides.
The pastor, a learned man, in his admiration and at the risk of being indiscreet, went to knock on Klopstock’s door, and begged him so insistently to open it that the scientist gave in. He took the pastor into his courtyard. At the first glace it was easy to see that Ludwig had found the secret of steering balloons.
“Your name is immortal, my friend!” cried the minister. “The entire universe will repeat it with enthusiasm! What glory will be yours!”
“Earth! Glory!” Ludwig repeated, disdainfully. “What does that matter to me? It’s the heavens I want! No one has been able to go higher than eight thousand meters; I shall go to twenty thousand! I shall go to two hundred thousand! I shall go into the realm of other worlds! I shall go to the other worlds! I shall go beyond! I shall study nature! The immensity and the unknown will belong to me. I’ve found the means of steering my aerostat. That was an easy problem to resolve. But I’ve done better. The hydrogen gas that my machine contains expands or contracts as I dictate, without loss. These canisters contain the means of procuring me vital air, even in places where it is impossible to breathe. Cold itself, I have vanquished; it will be unable to hurt me!”
The pastor stood there, astounded by so much genius and madness at the same time.
“Farewell,” said Ludwig. “Here is my will. If I fail in my enterprise, or if I no longer deign to return to the Earth, I leave it to you to look after that poor woman. Farewell!”
Without paying any heed to the remonstrations of the worthy churchman, he climbed into his balloon. He was about to take off when Ebba suddenly ran toward him, gazing at him with haggard eyes, clung on to the machine and shouted: “Don’t go! Don’t go!”
“You’re right,” said the scientist, after a moment’s reflection. “Come! You shall share my fortune and my joy.”
He picked her up. He seated her next to him. He waved to the pastor, and flew off into the sky.
The minister watched him for some time, maneuvering his machine easily, which ended up rising rapidly, soon appearing as nothing more than a black dot that gradually melted away into the azure of the heavens.
The worthy cleric awaited Ludwig Klopstock’s return with great anxiety.
Ludwig Klopstock never returned.
* * *
1 The German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), who considered that his vocation was to be “the Christian Homer,” spent 25 years writing and publishing his epic Messias (1748–1773; tr. as The Messiah); he produced other Biblical epics thereafter, but they never attained a similar prestige.
2 Frederick William Herschel (1738–1822) published his discovery of Saturn’s period of rotation in 1790, which seems inconsistent with the date in the following note—and neither sits well with the date of 1803 given at the beginning of the story—so Berthoud is evidently employing a certain poetic licence here.
3 Adrien Thilorier (1790–1844) first produced “dry ice” (accidentally) in 1834. Berthoud knew Thilorier personally and wrote a eulogy after his death, categorizing him as a “martyr” because he was a casualty of one of his own experiments.
4 The death of a German balloonist named Bitorff on 17 July 1812, recorded in German newspapers, was noted in the Encyclopédie Catholique, where Berthoud probably found the name.
5 Berthoud was probably inspired to write this story by the fact that Charles Green and Spencer Rush had set a new altitude record of 7.9 kilometers in 1839, which was to remain unsurpassed until 1862. The description of Ludwig’s experiences is presumably based on those reported by Green and Rush. The previous altitude record of 7.28 kilometers had been set in 1803, which might help to explain the date cited in the story’s opening.
THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was a prolific writer of mannered moralistic fantasies, who employed scientists as exemplary figures in several of his ingenious and innovative allegories, including “Doctor Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), “The Birthmark” (1843) and the famous “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), in which the daughter of a botanist growing poisonous plants becomes tragically toxic herself. All of them belong to the “no good will come of it all” school of thought, the obstinate negativity of which was a suspicion haunting scientific romance from its inception, and which still plagues modern science fiction.
“The Artist of the Beautiful,” first published in 1844 and reprinted in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), is particularly interesting among Hawthorne’s scientifically-infused stories because it is one of very few scientific romances that focuses on the artistry of technological endeavor rather than its utility, providing an emphasis that is almost unique within the genre. Like Berthoud’s story, it reflects the contemporary fascination with the mechanics of flight, and exhibits a similar fascination with the particular psychology of technical creativity, but in a significantly different context. Like Berthoud’s story, it leads to a conclusion that is strikingly unlike the conventional “happy endings” attached in a quasi-ritualistic fashion to the majority of stories responding to reader expectation—a convention inevitably stretched or fractured by the intrinsic imaginative reach of scientific romance, and frequently challenged therein.
An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop. It was a projecting window, and on the inside were suspended a variety of watches, pinchbeck, silver, and one or two of old, all with their faces turned from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform the wayfarers what o’clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to the window with his pale face bent earnestly over some delicate piece of the mechanism on which was thrown the concentrated luster of a shade lamp, appeared a young man.
“What can Owen Warland be about?” muttered old Peter Hovenden, himself a retired watchmaker, and the former master of this same young man whose occupation he was now wondering at. “What can the fellow be about? These six months past I have never come by his shop without seeing him just as steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond his usual foolery to seek for the perpetual motion, and yet I know enough of my old business to be certain that what he is now so busy with is no part of the machinery of a watch.”
“Perhaps, father,” said Annie, without showing much interest in the question, “Owen is inventing a new kind of timekeeper. I am sure he has ingenuity enough.”
“Poh, child! He has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything better than a Dutch boy,” answered her father, who had formerly been put to much vexation by Owen Warland’s irregular genius. “A plague on such ingenuity! All the effect that ever I knew of it was to spoil the accuracy of some of the best watches in my shop. He would turn the sun out of its orbit and derange the whole course of time, if, as I said before, his ingenuity could grasp anything bigger than a child’s toy!”
“Hush, father! He hears you!” whispered Annie, pressing the old man’s arm. “His ears are as delicate as his feelings, and you know how easily disturbed
they are. Do let us move on.”
So Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie plodded on without further conversation, until in a by-street of the town they found themselves passing the open door of a blacksmith’s shop. Within was seen the forge, now blazing up and illuminating the high and dusky roof, and now confining the luster to a narrow precinct of the coal-strewn floor, according as the breath of the bellows was puffed forth or again inhaled into its vast leather lungs. In the intervals of brightness it was easy to distinguish objects in remote corners of the shop and the horseshoes that hung upon the wall; in the momentary gloom the fire seemed to be glimmering amidst the vagueness of unenclosed space.
Moving about in this red glare and alternate dusk was the figure of the blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so picturesque an aspect of light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the black night, as if each would have snatched his comely strength from the other. Anon he drew a white-hot bar of iron from the coals, laid it on the anvil, uplifted his arm of might, and was seen enveloped in the myriads of sparks which the strokes of his hammer scattered into the surrounding gloom.
“Now, that is a pleasant sight,” said the old watchmaker. “I know what it is to work in gold, but give me the worker in iron after all is said and done. He spends his labor upon a reality. What say you, daughter Annie?”
“Pray don’t speak so loud, father,” whispered Annie. “Robert Danforth will hear you.”
“And what if he should hear me?” said Peter Hovenden. “I say again, it is a good and wholesome thing to depend upon main strength and reality, and to earn one’s bread with the bare and brawny arm of a blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels within a wheel, or loses his health or the nicety of his eyesight, as was my case, and finds himself in middle age, or a little after, past labor at his own trade and fit for nothing else, yet too poor to live at his ease. So I say once again, give me the main strength for my money. And then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of a blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Warland yonder?”
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