The Aerial Valley

by Brian Stableford

  The colony is divided into two halves, with the road to Vincennes in the middle. In the center of the first we find a square, with shade and a pond; it is ornamented at its interior angles by four sculpted groups representing four Frenchmen dear to the multitude, memories of miseries relieved:

  Parmentier,47 his face radiant, is showing peasants a potato that he has just picked. Other root vegetables lie at his feet. The peasants, bowing down, amazed, are admiring the ground and the happy agronomist by turns.

  Jacquard48 is having a female worker from Lyon try out her mew métier, with a pert little apprentice by her side.

  St. Vincent de Paul49 is bending down to pick up a poor naked child abandoned at the foot of a boundary-stone, who is reaching out her arms toward him in order to receive an open apron.

  And the Abbé de l’Épée50 is conversing, by means of his fingers, with a deaf-mute worker. A child is following their actions with his gaze, curious to learn.

  “This square,” says my companion, “is more particularly frequented by men. The young people there, going back inside, have just been devoting themselves to games appropriate to the development of vigor and skill, such as gymnastics, shooting with rifles or bows, or handball. The fee charged is insignificant. It’s the voluntary hardening of the soldier.

  “The four exterior faces are, as you can see, four large buildings.

  “Firstly, there is a theater in a simple style. Seats there are sold cheap. Only moral and patriotic plays are performed there. It also opens its doors, on occasion, to concerts and all kinds of popular ceremonies.

  “Secondly, a covered market. Staple foods are sold there, without haggling, at reduced prices. Inside there are vast food shops.

  “The third building contains the medical offices, the pharmacy, and a group of Sister of Charity uniquely devoted to the needy. It is from there that help emerges when people fall ill at home, or are injured, and when women are in childbirth and nursing their babies.

  “In the fourth edifice several useful establishments are brought together, including a pawnshop truly worthy of the name of mont-de-piété, the interest on advances, whatever guise they take, never rising above three per cent, and a library, heated and well-supplied, which hosts readings during the day and in the evening and where the printing of professional and attractive books is authorized. In all the rooms there are educative lecturers, experiments and instruments.”

  “Before going any further,” I said, “tell me by what magic this laborious hive was made to spring from the ground.”

  “The magic is quite simply the law of expropriation for public utility, but enlarged. I shall talk about it again soon. With that law in hand, the vast terrains necessary for its creation were expropriated en bloc in exactly a week. Then, what you call a laborious hive was marked out with the aid of surveying-staff, as one does for an English garden. The city of Paris took for its lot the streets, squares, gardens and public establishments. All the rest were bravely put up for sale at auction, with low reserves, in small fractions, with the unique condition of building houses there within a year, on prescribed plans, invariable for the façades as for the internal dispositions.

  “That resale covered the sale price, nothing more, but that had been anticipated. One does not speculate when doing good.”

  “I imagine that a maximum rent was agreed for each dwelling.”

  “Not at all. The particular furnishing of the lodgings, the physiognomy of the popular milieu and its destination scarcely admitted any other inhabitants than working men, so that an affluence of white posters established moderate monthly rents of its own accord.

  “That was already a great success, undoubtedly, but success has its obligations; it was necessary to aliment the colony cheaply. Listen to what the city of Paris did. Storage skips were suspended in the marketplace for use as granaries. Mountains of provisions were stored there, collected everywhere is propitious times for ready cash. There is flour, potatoes, fresh and dried vegetables, butter, eggs, cheeses, salt and pickles. The flour is delivered to the colony’s bakers and the surplus sold in the market, at a price that sometimes falls below, but with an injunction to conform to it, a fixed tariff.

  “I forgot to say that a recent decree has reduced the outflow of those precious foodstuffs, prohibiting their sale, in future, to be devoured by factories.

  “Every year, industry used to crush, to meet its needs, thousands upon thousands of cartloads of cheese, potatoes, soya beans, haricot beans, peas and lentils; it consumed thousands of baskets of fresh eggs. What is that, if not the bread of the people? It was understood that the first step to take was to enter into life cheaply was not to destroy the harvests of God. Whatever enables human to live is sacred.

  “To begin with, a few great ladies, strangers to the colony, were not ashamed to send their servants to the market to buy provisions, but that was soon put in order by a prohibition of selling to the same person on a single day goods worth more than a determined price. A firm line was taken and the scandal vanished.

  “The rest is explained in the same fashion; the games in the square, set up by the city of Paris, were yielded to a farmer, with orders not to demand any more than a tokenistic retribution. The pharmacy store is provisioned on a large scale; the medicaments are disturbed at a low price to those who can pay, or given away to others. It is the same for the physicians; they receive a complementary salary from the administration.

  “With regard to physicians, a great innovation is commencing to take root—I mean the abandonment of the hospital system. Indigents go into them without confidence, or any expectation of a cure, with an emphatic reluctance. Poor devils as we are, they say, the doors frown at us when we go in, and we smile when we take our leave of them. Alive, we train the doctors to save their opulent clients; dead, we become their professors of anatomy. An atrocious, criminal prejudice soiled with ingratitude, but a real, active prejudice.

  “What could be done?

  “The administration has taken a valiant initiative. Today, with regard to people afflicted with chronic or incurable conditions, the invalids are cared for under their own roof in their familiar bed, under supervision, with the aid of their relatives. From that measure, public assistance receives two benefits: palpable economies in a heavy budget, and a harvest of recoveries and blessings.”

  V. Popular Progress Continued

  From one half of the colony we passed to the other. There too we found a square similar to the first, but adopted for preference by women.

  Four groups decorate it; they represent French heroines, with slightly theatrical poses and settings calculated to appeal to the eyes and mind alike.

  There is Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, on the bank of the Seine, distributing to blockaded and storing provisions a convoy of food that she has brought herself, at the risk of her life, from Corbeil and Mélun.

  There is Jeanne d’Arc, the little shepherdess, sitting on a mound, surrounded by her flock. Floating above a tree, an angel is offering her a sword with one hand and pointing the way to Paris with the other. He seems to be saying to the historic walls: ‘I am the Archangel Michael; I have come to command you, on behalf of the Lord, to go into France, to help the Dauphin, in order that, through you, he will recover his kingdom, and you will take him to be crowned in Reims.’ She, trembling and transported, is extending her arms toward the celestial apparition.

  There is Louise Bergame, the daughter of the valet pursued during the Terror for having assisted his master’s flight. The scene is nocturnal. At the first sound, Louise has dressed in haste in her father’s livery. She has opened the door and presents herself to the police, who, taken in, arrest her. At her feet are her robe and bonnet behind her, Bergame, whom she has hidden carefully, asleep on a chair. There is a lamp on the table.51

  Finally, there are two women bearing arms; one of them is also holding a small child. A Spanish soldier, gripped by admiration, is presenting arms to them respectfully.


  That group immediately puts me in mind of a touching story I read in the work of an old chronicler. In the time of Charles V, some French town in Flanders having been besieged and captured, the furious enemy not wanting to grant any other capitulation except that the gentlewomen could come out, on foot, with their honor safe and the precious things they could carry. The old author adds that throughout Flanders that act of heroism is recalled every year by the general ringing of bells, that the anniversary is known as Ladies’ Eve, and that on that day husbands must do their wives’ bidding, with an exemplary docility.

  Beneath each group is inscribed, briefly, the story illustrated.

  Four buildings accompany the exterior façades of that second garden.

  Firstly, there is a church.

  “You can see that the edifice is vast, is it not? Well, on Sundays and Feast Days, there is no room inside. That is because on those days, the most celebrated preachers compete for the honor of going up into the pulpit. Make no mistake, one comes here to conquer one’s blazon of Christian eloquence. The workers flood in, initially attracted by the charm of the speech, and then nailed to their chairs and softened by touching advice.”

  Opposite is the building of refuges and schools.

  On one side, the public baths and washrooms.

  On the other side, the fourth edifice, bears on its fronton the inscription: Women’s Syndicate.

  “That astonishes you, I see, and I’ll take the lead. Under a regime where so much has been done for those who suffer, the question of women was bound to arise, to be studied and resolved. It was—but believe me, it wasn’t easy. For a long time it was whispered that misery, which speaks in the shadows to the ears of the daughters of the people, does not give them good advice; that a working woman cannot, if her work is not protected, provide for her needs and keep herself pure; and that in the final analysis her honor is that of her father, her mother and her family, for which society answers. But bah! There is no urgency—no strike of women, not one secret club, not the slightest ’93; and yet honesty tells us that the more a creature is gentle, trusting and unarmed, the more it is necessary to look after its rights. Finally, what was said clandestinely came to be voiced aloud. Then, people set bravely to work; a system of protection—no, I mean a system if distributive justice—was organized on behalf of women, summarized in measures of which I shall briefly sketch a few:

  “The admission of women, and only women, to the employments reserved for them by nature. Of their own accord they went into workshops, storehouses and shops dealing with some branch of female attire an ornamentation, and the preparation and selling of food—everywhere, in fact, where neither physical vigor nor mental toil was required. Console yourself then, my friend, for no longer seeing, in shops of caprice, demure paws laying out before your wife and daughter, silk, lace and perfumes for them to ogle. On the other hand, you will no longer see, in sordid factories, feeble creatures bent over hard labor which is the natural lot of men.

  “The modification of work in prisons, sweatshops and convents, in such a manner that it never contrived to provide dishonest competition, thus coming to assail the seamstress in her honest, often charged with a far greater burden than she was able to bear.

  “Prescriptions and encouragements tending to provide during unemployment, and to maintain salaries in equilibrium with the needs of the day.

  “The gratuitous return to her province of any woman requesting it, when deprived of the means of self-sufficiency in Paris.

  “It was necessary, above all, to supervise those new-born rights, to prevent them being stifled in their cradle. For that, the Women’s Syndicate was devised. A sentinel of the privileges of the weak, it mounted good guard around them, defending them against the poaching of the strong, drawing up legal evidence of faults and denouncing them to the authority, which intervened forcibly.

  “Justice to whomever merits it; our Parisiennes have been sublime in feminine devotion and patriotism. If one of their boutiques allowed itself to be invaded by men, it became a leper-colony. People prudently passed it by on the other side of the street, in order to avoid the contagion of its display. Any merchandise usually associated with women that was suspected of virile origin remained unsold.

  “There was, however, one moment of hesitation, the only one. When it was a question of opening bedroom doors to midwives, bourgeois women were in no hurry to dismiss doctors. The example then descended from the greatest ladies in Paris. It needed no more. From that day on the midwives were furious; it did not take long for it to be proven that they were as adept as their male colleagues, that skill substituted for force, and all was said.”

  I was assured that there would soon be a meeting of husbands in the great hall of the Women’s Syndicate, and that the women would be voted the recommended hand-kisses, but I dare not affirm the fact.

  “Look over there .You can see, can’t you, those swarms of women, busy whispering in that enclosure. One might almost think that one were listening to a pack of hunting-dogs murmuring.”

  “What you call an enclosure is the portion of the square devoted, without mixture, to women, just as certain railways compartments are on railway trains. They are gathering this morning to vote on a prize of three thousand francs that the city of Paris grants every year, on the first of January to the woman, married or widowed who has reaped the votes of her companions. On July the first it will be the turn of the young women. Otherwise, there is no program or condition for election. The electors are the sole judges of merit and, what is more, of the kind of merit to be lauded. The prize is awarded by the president of the Syndicate, in the Great Hall, in the presence of the maire and priest. If the young woman who obtains the favor of the urn in July gets married in the course of the year, the city takes charge of the wedding gala.

  “A similar ceremony, renewed twice yearly, takes place in every Mairie in a district, as in the colony. Even better—a fortunate contagion of good—on a large number of workshops, the chiefs of industry have installed urns at their own expense on behalf of the women they employ.”

  “In truth, you amaze me.”

  “Well, before surrendering to your amazement, know too that every female worker who marries, maiden or widow, receives on her wedding day a capital of five hundred francs drawn on the State’s income. There is only one condition: that she be French and Parisienne; or, to replace that latter title, that she has won the right of that city by ten years of uninterrupted labor and domicile in Paris.”

  “What! It suffices for a Parisienne to take a husband to become entitled to draw upon the public purse!”

  “It’s ruination, isn’t it? Well, my friend, on that point, take stock of the State’s balance-sheets, leaving aside, if you wish, the moral balance-sheet, and you’ll see that it’s a usurer’s deal. The calculation is simple. The exposure of foundlings is much rarer since this institution. Now, the five-hundred-franc dowry of each bride, invested with half-yearly dividends, would be a long way from ever reaching the level of the millions that it costs the State to shelter those poor bastards, replaced today by legitimate, pampered, caressed children brought up under their parents’ roof. Believe me, in the final account, expenditure of that nature always enriches a State.”

  VI. Popular Progress Continued

  Nine o’clock chimed. Hunger set to work. I proposed to my indefatigable companion that we should pursue our popular studies over the morning meal.

  A kind of restaurant came along in a timely fashion, if it is permissible to attach that name to the simple refectories distributed about the colony. The waitress, the table, the cloth, the cutlery and crockery are all appetizingly clean. We sit down, and the conversation continues apace, without our missing a bite.

  “Don’t think, my friend, that the district you’ve just visited is the only one of its kind. There are many of them around Paris, but this is the most complete. Don’t think, either, that everything is soothing relief for the masses that have taken refuge he
re, like those in a temple who have a right to sanctuary. Not in the least. What you see you will find again, grouped around the Mairie, in every district. Paris is overflowing with privileges for the people. There does not exist, so far as I know, any public establishment that is unique, without a tributary.

  “In the theaters—and I don’t except any—places are reserved for them, seats that are comfortable, clean, and, to sum it up in one word, honorable. The prices are modest. They routinely make up a quarter of the audience. It is forbidden to book them in advance; they wait, without overmuch impatience, for the doors to open, under the illuminated galleries, sheltered from bad weather. One no longer takes one’s ticket and one’s head-cold to the same box-office window.

  “In great national ceremonies, in the bosom of the solemnities of science, the arts and politics, the people have their bench of honor, the stalls that await them. Nothing is complete without them. As you can well imagine, a good guard is mounted around their reserved areas, otherwise there would be brisk, quiet invasions, by virtue of the maneuvers of office workers.

  “On the railways, their compartments are in every respect similar to those of opulence, almost of luxury—which is replaced by an exquisite cleanliness. Hot water bottles in December, blinds in July, cushions in all seasons. The prices are very moderate. There is better still: tickets for the suburban lines, already lowered during the week, cost even less on Sundays and feast days: a fortunate and moral innovation that gives the artisan, at a stroke, a kind thought and the facility to go on excursions on those days, with his wife on his arm and his children holding his hand.

  “On those days, too, in all the workplaces in the State and the city of Paris, the workman plays the bourgeois. For him, it is the seventh day of Genesis. In spite of that, if he has not missed the summons during the week, he receives his wage not for six days but for seven. Between us, that’s only just; admit that he would only be getting the right to repose in jest if it were not combined with the money to nourish himself.