Electric Life

by Albert Robida

  Counting on cutting this final period of proofs as short as possible, Georges declared himself to be satisfied with the arrangement, and took his father’s proposal to Estelle. Everything was rapidly settled. Besides which, Philox Lorris only needed to say the word to the Alpine Beacons to have Monsieur Lacombe transferred to that Administration’s Paris office; Estelle’s parents were able to come to live in Paris—to the great delight of Madame Lacombe, who thus saw one of her dreams realized.

  Georges Lorris and Estelle busied themselves with their future installation, with Madame Lacombe but according to the ideas of Philox Lorris. The latter negotiated in a matter of days the purchase for his son of a small house, in the center of Old Paris, on the heights of Passy. An Australian billionaire banker who had just engineered a fabulously fruitful crash on the South American Bourse wanted to dispose of it, in order to install himself in a vast estate in the Midi with the immense fortune harvested from that magnificent operation, there to found a powerful seigneurial dynasty far enough away from the disagreeable whining of former shareholders, in a land more aristocratic than Australia.

  The wealthy ex-banker in question, Arthur Pigott, considering Philox Lorris to be a man worthy of understanding him, explained his plan with tranquility when his buyer visited him at his little house.

  “Your old landed aristocracy has died of inanition, illustrious Monsieur,” he said, “or is in the process of concluding its extinction—so let’s blow it out, and replace it. For it’s necessary to replace it; that’s what nature wants. You know that an aristocracy has its role to play in social life, and that one has no sooner been overthrown—as your revolutions have proved—than another appears. At the origin of all great and noble families, Monsieur, what do you see? A shrewd founder, richer, and in consequence, more powerful than his neighbors! I don’t deign to ask how he amassed that fortune; he has it, that’s the main thing. Historians pass over that lightly, as a negligible detail...”

  “Excursions into enemy territory, lance in hand,” said Philox Lorris. “The conquest of some territory—or to put it another way, the violent expulsion or oppression of the occupants, who arrived earlier in the same fashion...”

  “Or to put it yet another way, the ravages of mercenaries—brutal ravages,” Monsieur Pigott went on, “the hideous violence of barbaric times! Well, one can’t deny progress! I dare to claim that in due course, that the historians who look into the origin of the noble family founded by me in my Duchy in the Dordogne, where I hope I shall have the pleasure of having you at my great hunts, will distinguish something else! No violence, no brutal mercenaries! They’ll be able to say: The ancestral Pigott, the founder, was entirely different from a vulgar Montmorency; he was a gentle rogue, a combatant of intelligence who was able to levy the tithe of intelligence on inferior creatures...”

  “Two or three hundred thousand five-thousand-franc shares, wasn’t it, in your last affair?”

  “Plus a few small extras, to compensate for serious expenses. I’ll go on! This is what the historians will say: He was able to levy the tithe of intelligence and came to our beautiful province bearing riches, to found an illustrious house, to plant the seigneurial tree whose branches extend so broadly today, sheltering our heads with their shade, and contribute greatly to the regeneration of principles of authority and sane ideas of social hierarchy too long weakened by our revolutions... There! That’s how a new aristocracy is founded!”

  And Monsieur Pigott was right.

  On the soon-to-be-swept-away ruins of the old world, a new aristocracy is being founded. What has become of the old one? Old and decadent families seem to be melting away and disappearing with greater rapidity with every passing day. We see their descendants impoverished, deterred from public affairs by suspicion of the masses, with no aptitude for practical sciences, unsuited to great industrial or commercial affairs, twiddling their thumbs in their dilapidated châteaux, which they cannot maintain or repair, or vegetating in wretched petty positions with no future prospects.

  Their lands, their châteaux and their very names are being transferred to the new aristocracy, the lords of the new strata, the Croesuses of the Bourse, enriched by others’ savings, to the notabilities of great industry or productive politics. Alongside those items of illustrious debris, happy to obtain petty employments in ministerial departments or factories, where the active blood of the old riders rots in lamentable stagnation, we see such great industrialists, gigantic strong-boxes, planting the flag of Plutus on the ancient domains of the ex-nobility, gradually renconstituting the vast fiefs of old on more solid bases.

  A few examples, in addition to the one furnished by the billionaire Pigott:

  The celebrated Marius Capouriès, the founder of a hundred factories, the organizer of syndicates taking possession of all the sewage-works and distilleries of an immense region. With his profits, which he can scarcely count, Marius Capouriès has gradually built up a nucleus of vast estates comprising the extent of a département and has recently been awarded a marquisate. Let us swiftly add that, among the simple petty clerks of one of his agencies, Marius Capouriès is worth every bit as much as a veritable Duc, descended from the kings of Sicily and Jerusalem, and three or four poor devils covered with blazons, whose fathers had lands and châteaux, guarded marches and frontiers, heads helmeted, and washed all the battlefields of ancient France with their blood.

  Monsieur Jules Pommard is no less famous than Marquis Marius. Launched into the game-rich terrain of politics, Jules Pommard is not one of those hunters who comes back empty-handed. He has had his highs and lows; once accused of corruption and misappropriation, but amnestied by success, he has, after having purged a few minor convictions, carved out in his province a veritable petty kingdom, in which he owns everything, directs everything, commands everyone and floats over everyone at the height of the serene majesty of a man who has arrived, nobly framed in a large historic château, having made it part of his royal domain—a château whose name he expects to hand down to his heirs.

  Here is an illustration nobler yet: Monsieur Malbousquet, another great industrialist, an iron king and prince of steel, the master and possessor of formidable metallurgical establishments, the owner of Tubes and numerous airship lines, at the lead of three hundred thousand workers and the most titanic machinery of which it is possible to dream; an immense assembly of terrifying engines, grinding, turning, twisting, striking, howling frightfully in monstrous factories, colossal cities of iron with strange architecture, in which giant pile-drivers rise up like extraordinary mobile and ferocious monuments, amid hurricanes of metallic rackets and whirlwinds of acrid fumes, above red furnaces stirred by mobs of gaunt, half-naked men, red-faced grilled and charred.

  The master of this veritably infernal realm does not care to live in it; he rules it from afar, commands and directs far from the infernal bustle, far from the rivers of incandescent molten iron and the blast-furnaces exhaling fiery breath; her reigns over his slaves of flesh and iron from the depths of a sumptuous study linked by Tele to the office of the engineer-director of the factories, in a resplendent mansion as big as Chambord and Coucy combined, built at a cost of millions in a charming location, with a river at its foot, flowing toward the sea, and beautiful forests, strictly guarded, stretching to the various horizons.

  As far as the eye can see, everything here belongs to Monsieur Malbousquet, already a Roman Comte, who has recently become a Duc, thanks to his billions; in this region, awarded to him as a duchy by the Chambers, everything is his, the soil and the people alike, held and bridled by a thousand bonds.

  It is, however, the present domain of the iron king, the great metallurgical center that was, in 1922 the principal nucleus of the social revolution, and which saw, during the temporary triumph of collectivist doctrines, the most complete upheavals.

  Here, while a frightful struggle broke out in Paris, while scenes of frightful savagery unfolded, where the enervated and deluded people, in the impossibility of
realizing the insensate dreams of rebels and Utopians, crazed innocents and braggarts, heaped ruins upon ruins and rushed in furious folly and universal collapse, during that unleashing of all deliria, in the great metallurgical center seized in the name of the collectivity, socialist theories were applied almost peacefully.

  The leaders, on the day of triumph, had found there a complete organization, in good working order, and they had thought that everything ought to continue as it had in the past, and even better, simply by virtue of the good will of all, given the simple suppression of directors and shareholders and the equal division of the integral product of the work of all.

  The program was simple, clear, within the range of the meanest intelligences, but its application, to everyone’s great astonishment, nevertheless gave rise from the first moment to harsh frictions. Could the decreed equality of rights—Holy Equality—accommodate the inequality of functions and work? The engineers had to be left to their tasks, because simple manual laborers could not think of replacing them, but ought not the others—bureaucrats, overseers and foremen—return to the ranks? How could the distribution of work be determined, with all these inequalities, which seemed to appear for the first time to everyone’s eyes? No one any longer wanted to do hard labor, and dangerous work; everyone, naturally, demanded the easiest and most comfortable work, the most tranquil positions.

  From the first day onwards, violent conflicts were produced, arguments broke out and very quickly became envenomed. In the midst of discord, disorder and even strikes by certain specialists, the factories limped along for some time, devouring the amassed mineral stocks and the funds seized from the safes. Then, abruptly, everything stopped; the machines uttered their last sigh, the blast-furnaces went out, and everything fell into frightful confusion.

  Collectivism died of its triumph. As best it could, the organism that it had found functional had run on for a few weeks, producing—according to the accounts rigorously kept by the offices—everything at a loss, for various reasons, primarily because of immense wastage, work poorly done and weakly sustained, during working hours diminished by half, and leaving, instead of fabulous profits to share out, as everyone had hoped., a deficit to make up, an enormous gulf getting wider by the hour.

  In six months of frightful anarchy, with the bitter sadness of beautiful dreams collapsed, lugubrious despair and impotent anger, with ruination, fury and hunger everywhere, the great industrial center was reduced to an immense heap of scrap iron, around which a desert gradually spread and the staring abandoned it in lamentable columns.

  When, after many further catastrophes, the anarchy in Paris—gradually extinguished in the blood of the socialist sects, which devoured one another—was definitively crushed by a return of common sense, powerfully aided by the strength passed into the hands of satisfied leaders, gorged on the spoils of the former society, there was no more disorder to repress in the iron realm; there was no longer anything there but ruins.

  Édouard Malbousquet, then young, an ex-mining engineer of low rank, enriched by a few petty profits collected from the troubled waters of the social revolution, was clever enough to gather a few friends among the new capitalists hatched in the torment, and to buy those sad ruins for a few crumbs of bread thrown to the surviving shareholders, and to begin everything again.

  Here is the result: at the very top, the powerful suzerain lord; at the very bottom, the rabble of humble vassals; one the one hand, a highly-placed political individual, a financier and industrialist, heaped with riches, titles and honors; and on the other, the black ant-hill of ironworkers, paid for their labor in miserly fashion, with cruel disillusionment on top.

  Our advanced scientific civilization, the excess of technology and industrialism, crushing humankind beneath machinery, or changing humans beings, not into machines themselves, but into mere fragments of mechanism, has therefore, in conclusion, ended up taking society backwards and creating above the laboring masses a new feudalism, as powerful, as prideful and as harsh in its domination as the old one, if not more so!

  Serfs of the industrial infernos, riveted to the hardest tasks, petty clerks nailed to their desks, petty engineers, slightly finer cogs in the great machine, petty traders, flattened and crushed by gigantic syndicates, peasants cultivating in accordance with new scientific methods, the lands of the new aristocrats, tell us whether the lot of the manual workers of the Middle Ages, of the centuries when people at least had the time to breathe, was harder than yours!

  The human hand, even covered with the iron gauntlet of the noble barons—the iron fist of feudalism—was surely less heavy than the pile-driver of today, the crushing symbol of the new feudalism of gold!

  The little house purchased by Philox Lorris from one of those potentates of finance and industry, neighbored by other houses of a Babylonian luxury, urban residences belonging to no-less-notable lords, was going to be transformed completely for the great engineer’s son; all the innovations, all the applications of modern science, were to institute the reign therein of a scientific comfort absolutely worthy of the enlightened century in which we have the good fortune to live, and of the great Philox Lorris himself.

  Naturally, there was very little garden: just a simple square of verdure serving the various buildings—space is so limited in Paris! That was, however, compensated by terraces, little platforms and suspended balconies, transformed into veritable forests—albeit forests as seen by looking through binoculars the wrong way—with Japanese bonsai trees, in accordance with the latest fashion. It is not only Paris that is narrow and cramped; one feels so crowded today on our over-full globe, where the jam-packed continents rub shoulders, that it is necessary to try to gain a little room by all possible means, by ingenious subterfuges.

  Would you like shady forests with old oaks with powerful branches, their roots twisted like nests of serpents, launching thick foliage in all directions? Would you like fantastic pines, bristling with needles and clinging to blocks of mossy rock? Would you like exotic trees, strange thickets, overhung by monstrous baobabs? Well, here on your balcony, in petty Japanese faience pots, here on your veranda, is a living forest in miniature: giant dwarfs, centenarian trees, vegetable colossi, maintained by the uncanny artistry of the gardeners of Edo, in the proportions of house-plants.

  It is a minuscule forest, but it is a forest all the same, with its bushy thickets, its floor carpeted with dwarf heather, its mysterious depths, which give you the vertigo and frisson of solitudes, with its rocks, and even its ravines, above which stand old stripped trunks, twisted and gnarled by the centuries, ravaged by storms; they are vast artificial landscapes, absolutely illusory, before which, by investing an atom of good will, one may seek the poetry of the dream, exactly as if one were wandering in one of the corners of wild nature that remain to us, scattered here and there throughout the world, and on the point of disappearing forever.

  Don’t search for other foliage in Paris, outside these artificial forests and meager window-boxes maintained with great difficulty around rich houses. The soil of Paris can scarcely produce anything, since it no longer exists, since its real earth has disappeared, or very nearly, replaced by a chaotic network of tunnels and various channels: Metro tunnels linking the districts and extending outside; sewers; drains; conduits for the innumerable wires of various Teles and electrical services, power, light, theater, music, etc., overlapping within a mass of concrete and stones, from which the roots of poor trees exiled by misfortune into that rocky conglomerate, saturated with various fluids, can only extract exceedingly meager nourishment, even by stretching out and becoming entangled beyond measure.

  But if Georges Lorris’ Parisian villa could scarcely display any other verdure than the compressed and stunted trees of those apartment forests, it possessed an annex a little further away, in the mountains of Limousin, thirty minutes by Tube and scarcely two hours by airship: a country house, small but comfortable, agreeably situated in a very beautiful landscape, half way up a rocky hill,
with trees of natural proportions and corners of veritable woods beneath its windows.

  Thanks to a good idea on the part of the architect, the upper part of the house, a sort of square turret overlooking the body of the main building, was movable and could rise up like a elevator cage to the crest of the nearby hill and stay there on fine days, eighty meters above the house. From there, the landscape was revealed more broadly, picturesque and tormented, cut by ravines, furrowed by rivers, and displayed in the distance, on isolated crags or the ridges of other hills, half a dozen châteaux—and, industry not yet being extensively developed in the region, only twenty smoky factories on the horizon.

  To get back to the Parisian house, abandoned by the billionaire banker as too simple and not longer appropriate to his high status, it was nevertheless a sumptuous little gem of modern architecture in a delightful location. It had an admirable and very extensive view from the loggias of the large drawing-room on the sixth floor above ground—which is to say, the first, as it is the custom to call it now that the main entrance to a house is on the roof by the aerial landing-stage. From that loggia, as from glazed miradors suspended from the facades, all Paris was visible: the immense quasi-international agglomerate on the banks of the Seine, of eleven million inhabitants, which is the beating heart of Europe, and almost of the world, by virtue of numerous Asiatic, African and American colonies settled within our walls. One floats above the most ancient quarters, those of old Lutèce, turned upside-down by embellishments and transformations, beyond which other more beautiful quarters—the modern quarters, already so astonishingly developed, project immense boulevards, still under construction, into the distance.