Rouletabille at Krupp's

by Gaston Leroux

  They were ready for anything—to blow the boat up or scuttle it—if they could not get through.

  The boilers were heated to the maximum. The entire hull of the Wesel was shuddering. And when, a kilometer from the frontier, the Boche vessels presented themselves, blocking the route, they went through the blockade—literally through it, for they sank one vessel, and were hit by a hail of machine-gun fire and ten shells…but they arrived in Holland. They arrived crippled, but they arrived!

  A shell had blown the captain, his first mate and three sailors to smithereens, but as for the five passengers who are of interest to us, they were safe and sound, without a scratch.

  Two hours later, Rouletabille and his acolytes, having explained the situation to the Dutch authorities, arrived in Arnhem, at the United Provinces Hotel, and immediately asked to see Madame Barbara Lixte.

  They received the reply: “Madame Barbara Lixte let this morning for Rotterdam with her husband, who had come to fetch her.”

  Chapter XXIII

  Barbara or Nicole?

  They left for Rotterdam that same evening, and arrived there the following morning. Strangely enough, the very different kinds of anguish of Fulbert and Serge Kaniewsky had converged. The last blow that had struck Serge in Arnhem had finally laid him low. All his rage and fury had abated. There was no longer anything left within him but an immense despair—and on that terrain, he was sure to meet the inventor.

  La Candeur was radiant, as was Vladimir, while Rouletabille was pensive. He had said: “It’s still not proof. She might have entrusted herself to Monsieur Lixte, who must certainly have come in search of his wife, after having been told of her arrival in Holland. This Monsieur Lixte, to whom Nicole might have confided herself, who knows the Boche and what they’re capable of, even outside their own country—remember how Nourry died—doubtless decided that it was preferable for Nicole to continue the comedy. Until we’ve caught up with them both, hope still remains to us.”

  Thus Rouletabille had spoken. Had anyone even heard him? The others made no reply. Did he even believe what he was saying himself?

  The fact is that he said it without any great conviction. He was worn out. He had accomplished more than he had hoped, and he no longer dared, after an adventure that had saved Paris, to ask Providence for another favor, that would have saved Nicole as well.

  He had moments, however, when it was as if he were awakened with a start by the vision of a gesture that he repeated mechanically. He believed himself, and felt himself, still in the process of striking Nicole! And he would have given his life not to have struck the true one!

  Until reaching Arnhem, he had shown himself to be strong—stronger than he would have believed; he had thought that there, at least, the doubt would cease.

  Well, the doubt was continuing...or, to put it more accurately, the hope, without having disappeared completely, was now very faint…very faint indeed...

  In the train, he wept silently on seeing the distraught faces of Fulbert and Serge.

  The Pole was no longer manifesting any hostility toward him. Docile, he allowed himself to be led, without any reaction. There was no longer anything but grief, in a corner...

  In Rotterdam, they set forth in pursuit of Lixhe—or, rather, the all followed Rouletabille, who searched for Lixhe. From the editorial offices they were sent to the harbor; they were seen wandering there like souls in torment along the canals animated by traffic multiplied tenfold since the war, in spite of the hindrance of submarines. They stopped for lunch in an immense brasserie where Lixhe usually ate. The brasserie was also a kind of commercial center where a thousand deals were struck over anchovy stew and enormous tankards of beer. But Lixhe was not there.

  Someone who knew Lixhe told them: “He left this morning for Flessingue.”

  They went to the police, who were also searching for them, and were told with certainty that Lixhe, who had been rejoined by his wife, a German prisoner for six months, had taken the train for Flessingue.

  An hour later, they took the train for Flessingue.

  They arrived in Flessingue just in time to see the ship carrying Lixhe and his wife leave.

  Rouletabille said: “If, as I assume, Nicole has entrusted herself entirely to Lixhe, the latter, thinking Nicole insufficiently safe in Holland, has taken her to England.

  They had to wait two days for a ship to England.

  Serge and Fulbert were no longer talking to Rouletabille at all. They sometimes listened to him, but like people who did not hear or did not understand. They were no longer eating. They were no longer even weeping.

  La Candeur and Vladimir went to play cards in cafés.

  The nights were terrible for Rouletabille, who was no longer sleeping. As soon as he became drowsy, he saw himself murdering Nicole.

  Finally, they embarked. The crossing was accomplished normally. They arrived in London and went to the police. There, they learned that Lixhe and his wife Barbara had just left for Liverpool.

  Serge declared that he would not go to Liverpool, that he would no longer have the strength, for he was keeping what remained to him to go back to France, to see once again the places where he had loved Nicole, and to die. Fulbert wanted to go with Rouletabille to Liverpool.

  “It’s better,” he said. “It will be more certain.” And he began to laugh, and embrace Rouletabille.

  Fulbert was on the brink of madness, so the reporter left him in London with Serge, under the protection of La Candeur and Vladimir, who shut both of them in the same room and went to the bar to consume cocktails, whisky and brandy, while they played dice interminably. In England, Vladimir had become Rumanian again, on Rouletabille’s advice.

  When the latter reached Liverpool everyone told him that Monsieur and Madame Lixhe had embarked in Liverpool for America. This time, no further doubt was possible; there was nothing more to do than go back to Paris.

  They went back to Paris.

  Before arriving at the railway station, Rouletabille said to Serge and Fulbert: “One hope remains to us. If Lixhe, in order to save Nicole from the Boche police, has simulated a departure for America with her, they must both have left the steamship when it called in at Brest.”

  “In that case,” said Serge, in a voice from beyond the grave, “we’ll find Nicole in her mother’s house.”

  “Possibly!” Rouletabille replied. “I’ve consulted the timetables. She might have arrived in Paris five hours ahead of us.”

  As soon as they disembarked in Paris, they climbed into a cab and were taken to Neuilly, to the Fulberts’ home.

  They did not find Nicole there. They did not even find Madame Fulbert. The house was locked up and the neighbors were unable to give them any useful information.

  That was the final straw. The father and the fiancé fell into one another’s arms.

  Rouletabille left them embracing and, perhaps as desperate as them, climbed back into the cab. He did not even here the shouts of La Candeur and Vladimir. He set off at top sped.

  He had give an address in the Rue de Saussaies—the address of the Sûreté Générale.

  When he arrived here, however, he saw Vladimir and La Candeur leaping out of another cab, and Fulbert and Serge getting out behind them.

  “We’re not leaving you yet,” said La Candeur. “We made them understand that if you left us like that, it was because you still had a glimmer of hope.”

  “None!” said Rouletabille. “None! It’s finished. I’ve just come to make a report on my mission. I’ve succeeded in saving Paris, but I haven’t succeeded in saving Nicole.”

  He crossed the courtyard in haste, and climbed the stairs. The other followed him. They had the habit by now of following him, and still nourishing, deep inside them, an impossible hope...

  When they arrived in the vestibule of the head of the Sûreté Générale, they perceived, beside a man they did not know, Nicole and Madame Fulbert!

  We shall not attempt to describe the scene that followed: the cries,
the tears of joy, the delirium of that unexpected reunion.

  “So it’s you who was pursuing us,” said the unknown man, who made himself known to them immediately, and who was none other than Monsieur Lixhe. “I thought we were dealing with Boche spies!”

  In response to that joyful tumult, the door opened, and then, in the head of the Sûreté Générale’s reception room, Rouletabille saw his editor and all the gentlemen from the famous secret cabinet meeting. They had gathered there to make a decision as to whether to advise Parisians to evacuate the capital in the face of the urgent peril of the Titania.

  Rouletabille went forward then, and, introducing Fulbert, Serge and Nicole to the gentlemen, cried: “I promised you that I would kill them or save them! My comrades and I have saved all three of them!”

  To which Horn-rimmed Glasses said: “Well, I can tell you now that I haven’t been so emotional since the Battle of the Marne.”

  The next day L’Époque appeared with a large headline:

  IF THE MIRACLE OF THE MARNE SAVED FRANCE, PARIS HAS BEEN SAVED BY THE MIRACLE OF ROULETABILLE!

  Afterword

  Has Rouletabille Really Saved Paris?

  The weakest element of Rouletabille chez Krupp, from a rational viewpoint, is the superweapon at its heart—a weakness inherent in the paradoxical nature of the motif. Because Leroux must have written the novel in a hurry—although it does show signs of secondary adjustment implying that it was probably completed in its entirety before he began work on Le Sous-marin “Le Vengeur,” which was surely written in dribs and drabs while it was being serialized—and because it was to some extent a pioneering exercise, he clearly did not think through the consequences of introducing such a powerful device into a novel whose fundamental conceptual framework demands that the world within the text ultimately be left unchanged. For that reason, having devoted a good deal of narrative labor to inventing and characterizing the Titania, he eventually had to abandon it—almost to forget it—in order to contrive a suspenseful climax in which it does not feature, revolving around a problem which, in terms of the big picture initially sketched out, is of scant relevance.

  As fictitious superweapons go, the Titania is rather unambitious. By 1917, several stories featuring nuclear weapons had already been published, and numerous stories extrapolating the power of mysterious rays akin to X-rays to apocalyptic proportions had also appeared. Leroux shows a deliberate restraint in deciding to set aside Professor Fulbert’s adventures with radium and make the Titania a more conventional weapon: effectively a kind of massive cluster bomb, whose hypothetical lethal force merely combines the effects of existing explosive, incendiary and gas-bearing shells. He was, however, compelled by the demands of his plot to equip it with something unique that might serve as a pivotal secret whose revelation or suppression might temporarily divert the course of history.

  Leroux’s solution to that narrative difficulty—the notion of an automatic course-adjustment system, which makes his “torpedo” into a prototypical “homing missile”—is not without ingenuity, and certainly entitles him to marks for anticipatory acumen, but in terms of narrative currency, it is not really up to the job. Whatever the L’Époque headline that concludes, the story might say, a moment’s thought would convince any reader that Rouletabille has not saved Paris at all. Far from it, in fact; if the novel’s imaginative parameters are accepted, then Germany is logically bound to smash French resistance and win the war—and the Kaiser’s reign as the literal Antichrist is about to begin.

  The Germans have, after all, actually built the Titania, and have the means to fire it. All that they lack, we are told, is a sequence of numbers important to the functioning of its course-correction system. They will discover that the sequence they have been given is misleading when they carry out the tests scheduled to take place immediately after the escape of the three people who know the real sequence. Given that the sequence in question has been determined by the scientific method, however, there is no earthly reason why Krupp’s engineers cannot work out what is wrong with the one they have been given, and correct it. And even if they cannot, why should that be fatal to the Titania’s chances of destroying Paris? Given that it can fly and explode, and sow destruction over such a wide area, is the pinpoint accuracy of its delivery so very important? If the purpose of the guidance mechanism is merely to correct for perturbations of the atmosphere, would it not be sufficient for the Germans merely to select a clear day on which to fire it? And even if it were not actually to land within the fortifications of Paris, or even its suburbs, is it not bound to do tremendous damage wherever it does land? At the most, the success of Rouletabille’s project can have only served to delay the inevitable—although he might have contrived a longer delay had he taken better advantage of his seemingly-abundant opportunities for sabotage at the Krupp factory.

  It is, however, arguable that looking at the problem—and, indeed, the entire novel—from the logical point of view is not the appropriate stance to take. The real narrative function of the Titania is not to investigate the question of whether a new innovation in weaponry might alter the course of the war decisively and conclusively in favor of one side or the other (as the invention of the atom bomb was to do in the American/Japanese War of 1943-1945) but to perform a symbolic function, in which the primary requirement is not so much its destructive potential as its sheer size. The essential feature of the Titania is that it looks colossal and awesome—that it is, in itself, a kind of alter ego of both the Kaiser and the Krupp armaments factory. Its defeat is similarly symbolic, and the logical objections raised in the previous paragraph are not really relevant in that context.

  Similar considerations apply to such questions as why, if Rouletabille is the French government’s “go-to guy” in a moment of national crisis, the poor fellow has been kicking his heels in the trenches for four years as a humble corporal, instead of serving as a field agent in the French Secret Service. His return journey from the trenches in the first chapter of the story is, in its fashion, just as symbolic as his tour of Krupp Hell or the climactic chase (during which the demands of narrative suspense require him unaccountably to forget how to use a telephone, as well as his urgent and imperious duty to report his success in extracting the mad scientist and the wobbly Pole from German hands to his own government). It is, however, the Titania that is the novel’s central symbol and scarecrow-in-chief: the Kaiser, and everything the Kaiser stands for, writ large.

  In the real world, of course, there are no weapons too dreadful to use, and it does not matter a damn whether the thread currently holding them over our head like the Sword of Damocles holds firm or not, because we are perfectly capable of destroying civilization, and ourselves, merely by continuing to squander the ecological and economic capital we have inherited—and, indeed, are well on the way to completing the job. There is nothing wrong, however, given such beleaguered circumstances, in a touch of nostalgia and escapism, which can take us back, temporarily, to a more innocent way of thinking, when we could still just about believe, if we only shut our eyes and tried hard enough, in miracles and heroes.

  Notes

  1 Available in a Black Coat Press edition as The Human Arrow, ISBN 978-1-61227-045-6.

  2 Available in a Black Coat Press edition as The Givreuse Enigma, ISBN 978-1-935558-39-2.

  3 Le Sous-marin “le Vengeur” was split into two volumes for book publication by Lafitte in 1920, where it bore the collective title of Aventures effroyables de M. Herbert de Renich [The Frightful Adventures of Herbert de Renich], and the individual volumes were entitled Le Capitaine Hyx [Captain Hyx] and La Bataille invisible [The Invisible Battle]. The two volumes were translated into English, rather confusingly, as The Adventures of Carolus Herbert and The Veiled Prisoner.

  4 Available in a Black Coat Press edition as Rouletabille and the Mystery of the Yellow Room, ISBN 978-1-934543-60-3.

  5 The Thirty-Nine Steps is nowadays much more famous than Greenmantle because of Alfred Hitchock’
s classic film—which threw away all but the barest bones of Buchan’s lame plot and substituted a much better one—although the latter is a far better book. Leroux suffered a similar fate when the various cinematic and stage adaptations of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910; available in a Black Coat Press edition as The Phantom of the Opera, ISBN 978-1-932983-13-5) gradually focused his posthumous fame on that single work, eclipsing many that are considerably more interesting as texts.

  6 Rouletabille à la guerre was split into two volumes for book publication by Lafitte in 1916, as Le Château noir [The Black Castle] and Les Étranges noces de Rouletabille [Rouletabille’s Strange Wedding], thus creating the ambiguity as to whether Rouletabille chez Krupp is the fifth or sixth item in the series.

  7 Noyon, in the Compiègne, lent its name to two major battles in the Great War subsequent to the writing of Rouletabille chez Krupp’s. It was the point at which the Germans’ Great Spring Offensive was conclusively stopped in March 1918, and the scene of further fierce fighting when the Allies began to drive the Germans back, retaking the town in August 1918. Georges Clemenceau had uttered his famous quote observing that “les Allemands sont à Noyon” in 1915

  8 A patriotic bronze commemorating the Franco-Prussian War, cast in 1874. Copies of it became commonplace symbols during and after the Great War. The Latin title translates as “Glory to the Vanquished.”

  9 Presumably Georges Clemenceau, President of the Council and Minister of War.

  10 Probably Stephen Pichon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs

  11 Possibly Louis Loucheur, the Armaments Minister

  12 The French biologist Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), winner of a Nobel Prize in 1912 for work done in Canada in the early 1900s, joined the Rockefeller Institute in 1906.