Electric Life

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by Albert Robida


  Philox was full of attentions for Madame Lacombe, who was still slightly embarrassed by the memory of her conversation with the illustrious scientist’s phonograph. “As you see, my dear Madame,” he said to her, “I’ve been careful to put on the slippers that you were kind enough to give me on that day when a certain English lady called me a villainous boor. Perhaps I’m confused, though—was it really the English lady who…?”

  “It was the English lady,” said Madame Lacombe, swiftly, “and I beg you to believe that, in the elevator that transported us to the landing-stage, I gave that islander a thorough scolding for her impoliteness!”

  “I don’t doubt it, and I offer you my warmest thanks.”

  Philox Loris had drawn up the itinerary of the Engagement Voyage; he handed the program to his son over dessert.

  “My dear children,” he said, “I have made every effort to render your voyage pleasant and profitable; you will find all the necessary books and instruments in your baggage—sextants, maps, guides, statistics, questionnaires, a compass, test-tubes, etc. Here is the program, full, as you can see, of genuine attractions:

  “A visit to the electric blast furnaces, forges and rolling-mills of Saint-Étienne, to study and report on the various improvements made over the last ten years, etc.

  “A visit to the great Central Power Station in Auvergne, including a complete summary, plan, cross-section and elevation, with explanatory notes, to study the system of artificial volcanoes adjoining the great reservoir, and to develop considerations of the future of major exploitations of electric force, etc.

  “A study, in the former coal-field of Flanders, of the establishments of the great enterprise of the electric transformation of planetary motion into motive force transportable at a distance and distributable in infinitesimal quantities—establishments that were founded when the coal-mines were exhausted and saved the region’s industries from total ruin, etc…to find a few new applications, if possible and a few simplifications of method, etc...

  “What do you say to that? Haven’t I prepared you a charming voyage?”

  Philox Lorris finished speaking and handed the attractive program in question to his son, with a book of tickets,

  “Superb!” the young man replied, putting the program and the tickets in his pocket.

  Estelle did not dare say anything, but in the depths of her heart, she thought the attractions a trifle feeble.

  Only the courageous Madame Lacombe hazarded a few observations. “Is that really an Engagement Voyage?” she said. “it seems to me that a nice little excursion to the European Park at Italy, to Genoa, the beautiful Venice, Rome, Naples, Sorrento and Palermo, going from spa to spa all the way to Constantinople via Tunis, Cairo and so on, would be more suitable.”

  “People are tired of seeing all that via the Tele,” the great Philox replied, “whereas one comes back from a good voyage of study stuffed with new ideas. Just ask Madame Lorris. We made our honeymoon voyage in the industrial centers of America, going from factory to factory. I’m sure, even though she hasn’t taken up a scientific career and hasn’t wanted to associate herself with my work, that Madame Loris brought back a thousand memories from Chicago even so...”

  The lunch did not drag on, Philox Lorris being in a hurry to get back to his laboratory. He did not even come up to the landing-stage to watch the fiancés depart, contenting himself with giving his son a phonographic recording. “Here, this is to wish you bon voyage and contains my final instructions; I dictated them while shaving this morning. Au revoir!”

  The fiancés did not leave unaccompanied. The companions required by propriety were Philox Lorris’ private secretary, Monsieur Sulfatin, and a great industrialist, Adrien La Héronnière, formerly associated with Philox’s enterprises but now retired from business for reasons of health.

  While the travelers install themselves in the airship, it is appropriate to introduce these two individuals.

  Secretary Sulfatin is a tall, solid and vigorous fellow, seemingly about thirty-five or thirty-six years old, broad-shouldered, squarely built, a trifle coarse in his manners and inelegant in his physiognomy, but extremely intelligent, with extraordinarily keen and piercing eyes as glaring as electric light. The name Sulfatin might seem odd, but no one knows him by any other.

  There is a mysterious legend regarding Philox Lorris’ secretary. According to what is said, and accepted by the scientific world, Sulfatin has no mother or father, albeit without being an orphan, for he has never had either—never! Sulfatin was not born in the normal way—the way that is, at least, presently normal for humans. In a word, Sulfatin is a creation; a chemistry laboratory heard his first whimpers, a bottle was his cradle. He was born some forty years ago of the chemical compounds of a fantastic doctor whose head was inflamed by strange ideas, sometimes of genius, who died insane after having squandered his fortune and his brain on research into the great problems of nature.

  Of all the discoveries of that immense genius, so unfortunately foundered in mental alienation before having been able to bring his research and his miraculous experiments to a proper conclusion, nothing survives but the resurrection of an edible ammonite extinct since the Tertiary Era and now cultivated on our coasts in lavish beds, which offer serious competition to the oyster-beds of Cancale and Arcachon; an experimental ichthyosaurus that only lived for six weeks, the skeleton of which is preserved in the Museum; and Sulfatin, an artificially-produced specimen of natural, primordial humankind, exempt from intellectual deformations produced in the course of a long sequence of generations.

  The doctor having taken his secret to the tomb, no one knows exactly how much truth there is in the mysterious origin attributed to Sulfatin. At any rate, the observers who have tracked him since his infancy have never been able to discover any trace within him of the penchants, preconceived ideas and instinctive preferences that we bring with us when we come into the world, which we obtain from distant ancestors and which germinate in our brains and develop of their own accord. His new brain being virgin territory, Sulfatin’s mind developed in an orderly and logical fashion, according to his personal observations. Extremely intelligent, manifesting a veritable hunger, so to speak, for the study of science, Sulfatin, having always lived in a scientific environment, gradually became a first-class medical engineer—and if the mind progressed incessantly, the body also developed admirably, defying all attacks by the countless microbes of every sort among which we are condemned to move. That brand new organism, devoid of any flaw or defect of atavistic physiology, offered almost no purchase to the maladies that lie in wait for us—and, alas, all too often find the ground prepared.

  The other traveling companion, Adrien La Héronnière, is not modeled on the same template as Sulfatin, poor fellow! Just look at that puny and thin man, lanky rather than tall, with sunken eyes sheltering behind a pince-nez, with hollow cheeks beneath an immense forehead, a round smooth skull like an ostrich egg placed within some kind of rare and filamentous cotton—all that remains of his hair, linked by a few wisps to a sparse white beard. That bizarre head trembles and oscillates constantly in the false collar that sustains the chin, linked to a lamentable and macabre body that has the appearance of a clothed skeleton, the bones of which one is astonished not to hear clicking and rattling at the slightest breath of wind.

  Poor human debris, alas! A sad invalid! A wrinkled, crushed, pulverized carcass, ground down, so to speak, by all the ferocious gears, infernal straps and frantically spinning wheels of the terrible machinery of modern life.

  You might, for the sake of politeness, credit the poor gentleman with slightly fewer than seventy years, thinking to make him younger, although, in reality, that venerable ancestor is only forty-five!

  Yes, Adrien La Héronnière is the perfect image of the man of our anemic and enervated era—which is to say, that image taken to the full extent of ideal exaggeration. He is the man of the present day: the sad and fragile human animal, whom the truly electric excess of our
breathless and feverish wears away so rapidly when he does not have the will-power or the opportunity periodically to rest his mind, tormented by an excessive and continual torsion; to go and steep his body every day in the bath of reparative nature, in complete relaxation, far away from Paris, that pitiless twister of minds; far away from centers of business, factories, offices, shops; far away from politics, and, above all, from those tyrannical social agents that make life so harsh and enervating, the Teles—all those phones, those pitiless engines, pistons and motors of absorbent electric life in the midst of which we live, run, fly and pant, carried away in a formidable and fulgurant whirlwind!

  The profound and lamentable physical disability of over-refined families appears clearly in that unfortunate biped, who has lost almost all human appearance. Similar specimens of the King of Creation encounter one another today by the thousand in our great cities, in the business centers where modern life, with its terrible exigencies, ravages the enervated organism from birth onwards—overexcited intellectually thereafter by the excessive cultivation of the brain, by the uninterrupted series of tortuous examinations succeeding one another, from beginning to end, from entrance to exit, in almost every career, for the attainment of innumerable indispensable qualifications and diplomas.

  Attempts at renovation by means of gymnastics and physical exercise, logically organized and conducted, that were undertaken in the last century, did not succeed. After a few relative successes and a certain initial vogue, gymnastics and rational training were abandoned, the time taken over by studies or devoured by initial lack of work and then lack of strength.

  The generations, increasingly debilitated by excessive cerebral labor, by the intellectual overwork imposed by circumstances—an overwork that no one can escape—soon ceased to struggle; they renounced the necessary counterweight of corporeal exercise, allowed themselves to be gradually beaten down by anemia, and lay down one after another on the battlefield, exhausted before old age.

  The physicians, frightened by this unpreventable degeneration, did, it is true, when it was necessary to renounce the struggle of physical exercise, attempt other means, and conducted a few trial reconstitutions of over-refined families by means of intelligent cross-breeding, marrying a few sons of worn out cerebra to sturdy country girls discovered with great difficulty in the depths of some remote village, or a few pale and frail female descendants of the ultra-civilized to coarse negro street-porters who could scarcely read and write, collected from the ports of the Congo and the African lakes. In order for these attempts at reconstitution to have had any effect on the future of the race, however, would have required the interference of the State and an obligatory regulation of marriages.

  A reconstitution imposed by decree, undertaken on a large scale and pursue methodically for several generations would certainly have produced good results; unfortunately, in spite of the urgency, political circumstances have not thus far permitted the government to embark courageously upon that path and assume its new responsibilities. We are insufficiently mature for that idea; we admit that a government can dispose of the lives of its citizens on a whim, and strew the cadavers of the governed all over the world, but we cannot yet imagine a government as the veritable head of a family, preoccupied, by contrast, with humans yet to be born and attempting to ensure them as far as possible, by sage measures, a healthy and robust constitution.

  Behold in this funereal scarecrow of sparrows, the tottering Adrien La Héronnière, the descendant of the robust fellows that old historians have described to us: the son of Gauls hardened to every struggle and braving all bad weather half-naked; the son of gigantic Franks, rude Normans, vigorous Medieval mercenaries who went forth clad in carapaces of iron bearing weapons of formidable weight. The descendant, alas, bears less resemblance to those hard-fleshed and hot-blooded ancestors than to a grotesque baboon tremulous with senility!

  Poor La Héronnière! Submissive since his most tender years to the most intensive cultivation, he had, on his seventeenth birthday, a doctoral diploma in every science, and his qualification as an engineer. O joy! He graduated near the top of his class from the International Institute of Scientific Industry, and, equipped with the finest intellectual weapons, threw himself into battle with the determination to make his fortune as rapidly as possible.

  Remember that today, when the cost of living has risen so fabulously, and a petty rentier who possesses a capital of a million can scarcely live on his income in a remote rural area, that the word “fortune” can represent several millions!

  Hypnotized by the gleam of that magic word, our La Héronnière threw himself into gear; body, soul and mind, everything in him was devoted to business. Attached to Philox Lorris’ laboratory, he soon became a collaborator in important research, associated with one of his great enterprises.

  For years, he knew no rest. In our epoch, even if the body rests by night—after long waking hours, of course—the enfevered mind can never pause and, a machine with too much momentum, it continues to toil during slumber. One dreams business, one sleeps fitfully in the perpetual nightmare of toil, of enterprises in progress, of projected tasks...

  “Later! I don’t have time! Later! When I’ve made my fortune!” La Héronnière said to himself when aspirations for calm chanced to occur to him.

  Distractions postponed! Marriage postponed! La Héronnière plunged even deeper into study and work, in order to arrive at his goal more rapidly; but when he finally reached that goal—the fortune, the glittering fortune, that ought to have permitted him all the joys he had put off for so long—the opulent Adrien La Héronnière was a senile quadragenarian, devoid of teeth, appetite, hair, stomach, worn to the lining, bared to the thread, capable at the most, if he were very careful, of vegetating for a few more years in the depths of an armchair, in a state of complete bodily collapse, in the final flickers of a vacillating mentality that the slightest breath might snuff out. It was in vain that the leading lights of the Faculty, summoned to the rescue, tried by means of the most vigorous tonics to restore a little vigor to that premature old age, to galvanize the unfortunate millionaire; no remedy that was tried produced anything but temporary improvements, and only succeeded in making him a little less weak.

  It was then that Sulfatin, one of the most eminent medical engineers, an audacious intelligence searching beyond all familiar ideas and treatments, undertook to get a grip on the substructure of the organism that was ready to crumble, and to rebuild the man completely, from scratch.

  By virtue of a contract discussed and signed, in exchange for a series of rapidly-rising fees increasing with every year gained, he undertook to keep his patient alive and render him at least the appearance of average health by the end of the third year. The patient put himself entirely in his hands and promised, on penalty of an enormous forfeit, to follow the instituted treatment completely an integrally. Having lived for some time in an “incubator” invented by the engineer-physician Sulfatin, similar to those in which premature babies are kept for their first months, La Héronnière slowly began to improve. Initially, Sulfatin had given him a former senior hospital nurse as a governess, who treated him as an infant, feeding him with a bottle and taking him for walks in a perambulator under the trees in the grounds of the Philox Lorris house, and putting him to bed when the rocking of the vehicle had sent him to sleep. When he was able to move again, and walk without too much difficulty, Sulfatin had him abandon the perambulator and allowed him to go out occasionally. That was already a good result.

  “If that devil Sulfatin prolongs my life by twenty years, I’ll be absolutely ruined!” La Héronnière sometimes moaned.

  “Don’t worry,” said Sulfatin. “In five or six years, when you’re well enough, I’ll allow you to dabble in business again, in small doses, and you’ll get back the fees you’ll have to pay me. But absolute obedience, you hear, or I’ll abandon you and invoke the forfeit, the famous forfeit!”

  “Yes, yes, yes!”

  And the frig
htened Monsieur La Héronnière submitted, without allowing himself the slightest objection, to the direction of the medical engineer.

  When he organized his son’s Engagement Voyage and gave the young couple the strange Dr. Sulfatin and his patient for companions, Philox Lorris, the “big chief,” had a long conversation with Sulfatin and gave him minutely-detailed instructions.

  “In brief, my friend, your role with regard to these two fiancés is quite simple. What I need is for them to come back at daggers drawn, or, at least, for that scatterbrain Georges to have lost his illusions with regard to his fiancée on the way. You know, of course that a man in love is hypnotized and deluded; well, let’s wake him up and disillusion him! A few good shadows projected over the shiny and incessantly sparkling object! You understand, don’t you, that I have other things in mind for my son: Mademoiselle Senatress Coupard, of the Sarthe, or Doctress Bardoz. And what would arrange matters completely if you’re sufficiently adroit, is for you to marry the demoiselle yourself—I’ll provide the dowry—or marry her off to La Héronnière…he’s beginning to look presentable, La Héronnière. Understood, no? At the same time, as you have your patient with you, think of experiments for our great project, which all this fuss over our young folk shouldn’t make us forget.”

  “Understood, loud and clear!” Sulfatin replied.

  As is evident, if Philox Lorris was putting on an appearance of granting his son the bride of his choice, he had nevertheless maintained a hidden agenda, and hoped, in the final analysis, that once the Engagement Voyage had been suitably terminated by a cooling or a rupture, the Lorris blood that had been vitiated by an artistic ancestor would have the opportunity to be revivified by the marriage of his son to someone properly qualified. In order to be certain of bringing about a quarrel between the two fiancés, he had placed a trustworthy man by their side, who would find a means to disillusion young Lorris and make him sensitive to the inconveniences of a frivolous marriage.

 

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