by Emile Calvet
“Can you not venture some hypothesis regarding the secret that your savant friend will reveal, my dear colleague?”
“No, for Ho-wey-hu, in fear of being troubled, either by criticisms or advice, has kept the nature of his work absolutely secret. However, as he is occupied with astronomy, physics and transcendent mechanics, it’s probably to one of those three branches that we ought to attribute the invention that he’s going to submit to us.”
“Where in the city is the Institut situated?” the doctor asked, suddenly.
“At the end of the Pont des Arts, of course!” Gédéon replied, yawning with his eyes closed. “It was at the book-dealer’s opposite that I set the Collardon story a few days ago that went so badly awry.”
A furious kick from Antius recalled the sleeper to reality.
“What’s up?” exclaimed Gédéon, jumping sideways. “Have we been derailed?”
“You’re dreaming, my friend,” said Antius, in a perfectly tranquil voice, while looking at his nephew with an irritated expression.
“I beg your pardon,” said the young man, prudently drawing away from his guardian. Suddenly, he added: “I was, indeed, dreaming, for there’s the crystal bridge.” He pointed to a brilliant line cutting the horizon.
“The Institut, Doctor, is five hundred meters from the bridge and overlooks the Seine estuary,” said the schoolmaster, attributing the young man’s rambling to the incoherence of ideas that sometimes accompanies awakening.
A few minutes later they passed over the glass bridge, busy at that moment with a large number of citizens, the majority of whom were heading for the left bank.
A few minutes later, the electric vehicle arrived at its terminus. The wheels, suddenly imprisoned by their brakes, skidded for a few meters and the machine came to an abrupt stop.
The travelers got down. A few paces further on they left the shady pathway and a magical spectacle was suddenly offered to their gaze.
In front of them, surrounded by the high hills of the west, which formed a grandiose frame for it, streaming with verdure, gold and marble, the lake, as resplendent as a mass of molten silver, unfurled in its full extent.
To the left, behind a vast semicircle of grass, stood a palace of striking grandeur and magnificence.
“That’s the Institut, Messieurs,” said Herber.
In saying three days before that the palace of the five academies was the most magnificent in the city, the schoolmaster had been voicing an opinion whose exactitude was glaringly obvious. Established on a platform, the palace, constructed in white marble, adopted the form of the arc of a circle and presented, over an extent of several hundred meters, an advanced entablature, sustained by a file of Corinthian columns of admirable effect. The fronton of the monument, sculpted in relief along its entire extent, bore at its center a magnificent statue of Science, surrounded by allegorical symbols.
An innumerable quantity of busts representing the illustrious individuals whose work had contributed to general wellbeing stood out over the façade. The cupola, high and superb, covered with bronzed aluminum with gleams of azure, was constellated with thick moldings of pure gold representing scientific attributes.
A compact crowd was going up the steps of a monumental staircase that extended to the main door.
Herber snatched his companions from their contemplation and headed toward the building with them. The four men joined the stream of the elect and went into a vast vestibule, at the back of which the door to the session hall opened.
The schoolmaster presented the tickets to an usher, who, abandoning the people surrounding him, bowed respectfully and invited the visitors to follow him.
When they reached the landing, the guide headed for a circular corridor, the door to which, carefully closed, he opened. At the end of the corridor, the usher lifted the curtain of a reserved box and stood aside, inviting Herber and his guests to take possession of it.
On going into the enclosure, already overflowing with spectators, the travelers were struck with admiration by the majestic aspect of the hall.
The part reserved for the public, semi-circular in shape, was ornamented with marvelous artistry and organized with a perfect intelligence of the laws of acoustics.
The stage was presently occupied by the entire academic body. Seated on a kind of elevated throne, his hand resting on a table covered with drapes, the president of the Académie des Sciences, an old man full of majesty, overlooked a rich and elegant podium reserved for speakers.
As two o’clock chimed on the palace clock, the president struck a golden bell and a solemn silence was suddenly imposed on the entire assembly. A secretary climbed up to the chair and deposited a few documents in front of the august individual who was in charge of the session. The latter, after a rapid inspection, stood up and, addressing the titular members whose gazes converged upon him, began speaking.
“Messieurs,” he said, “because of the important discovery that the illustrious president of the Academy of Science of the Sandwich Islands is to submit to us, we have been obliged to postpone until a later session a few reports that have been lodged in recent days. However, we ought to mention the magnetic observations that have been made this month at the North Pole station.”
The physicist and the doctor looked at one another in amazement.
“It is well-known that the observatory established for hundred years ago at the extremity of the terrestrial axis has rendered great services to the general physics of the globe and to astronomical observation. Our forefathers, convinced of the importance of the conquest of the pole, but only able to dispose of primitive means of locomotion, tried in vain to cross the inviolable barrier of eternal ice, and the bones of many martyrs of science whitened in the ice-fields of the boreal world. Let us conserve a pious memory of them.
“For four months, the observers at the polar station have seen the sun describing circles parallel to the horizon without interruption. That confused light constitutes for some a sufficiently wearisome anomaly for them to anticipate impatiently the long six-month night that will commence for them with the autumnal equinox.
“The temperature of the interior sea, the existence of which stimulated so much controversy at the beginning of the modern era, is about ten degrees; that of the atmosphere has reached fourteen. I will add that, in accordance with the wishes of some scientific bodies, the material establishment of the origin of the meridians over an extent of two hundred meters is now an accomplished fact.
“I cannot leave in the shade the remarkable work that the South American Academy of Science has undertaken in the immense plain of the Pampas. The idea of establishing powerful luminous sources on the surface of the ground, disposed in geometrical shapes, in order to provoke the attention of observers on Mars and Venus and to convince them that the Earth is inhabited by intelligent beings, goes back to the 19th century, but only provoked irony in that obscure era, which invariably attempted to stifle all great inventions at their outset.37 The following centuries, however, more enlightened, opposed a deadlier weapon to it: indifference.
“Today, that audacious conception has been realized. Immense electric beams, departing from a territory of three thousand six hundred square myriameters, is in the process of construction, and the scale of signals has been carefully elaborated. We shall be informed of the precise timetable of experiments, the results of which will be awaited with excitement by the entire world.
“I must now give the floor to our honored colleague Ho-wey-hu. That scientist is ready to reveal to you the famous endeavor which, by reason of its mysterious character and the high renown of the inventor, has attracted everyone’s attention for some time.”
At these words, a tremor ran through the assembly. At a sign from the president, a rich curtain covering the back wall of the hemicycle was drawn by two ushers, and an old man whose imposing visage bore the sublime imprint of genius advanced slowly toward the stage.
A double salvo of applause greeted his entrance.
At the invitation of the president, the illustrious scientist climbed the steps to the podium. Having arrived in front of the public, the inventor bowed profoundly and began to speak.
“Messieurs,” he said, “the principle of scientific conquest, which I have pursued almost exclusively during the most active period of my existence, and the results of which I am permitted to submit to you today, goes back to the period of alchemy, that strange science devoid of method or foundation, which was born of vague scientific conceptions brought back from the Orient on the return from the crusades.
“For three or four hundred years, the secrets of alchemy were the province of a few audacious minds wandering in the absurd, whose disordered researches nevertheless rendered great services to the methodical and rational chemistry that flourished at the end of the 18th century. Above all, the alchemists pursued, under the name of the Great Work, a particular instance of the transformation of matter. They were defeated by that redoubtable problem. It is a problem of which today’s science is the master.”
A formidable salvo of prolonged applause greeted these words.
“Messieurs,” the orator continued, “I would not have undertaken my endeavors if, from the start, I had not been able to take as a point of support a discovery that illuminated the end of the 19th century: radiant matter.
“We are all familiar with the celebrated discovery of Monsieur Crookes, whose efforts were particularly devoted to the study of the mysterious forces that govern matter. The physicist in question, whose work sometimes brought into evidence seemingly contradictory phenomena, the source of ardent controversy, succeeded in establishing that gases, reduced to a state of almost absolute rarefaction and submitted to the influence of negative electricity, suddenly became endowed with an intense activity and produced extraordinary luminous and calorific effects.38
“The matter thus dissociated was subsequently identified with the cosmic, or primordial state of elementary matter. All substances being formed of a unique, simple and identical matter—a verity suspected since the 19th century—and the return to the cosmic state having become possible, a capital problem arose: the reconstitution of substances according to the laws presiding over their formation. That is the research that has absorbed me for thirty years, and I can affirm today that with the exclusive source of nitrogen, returned to the state of radiant matter at a pressure of one hundred and twentieth of an atmosphere, I have been able to create all the simple substances known to this day.”
A frenetic thunder of applause responded to this declaration by the illustrious physicist.
At the same time, for laboratory assistants came into the hemicircle and deposited on a long elliptical table set up in front the academicians a long series of bottles full of gas, pulverized matter and sparkling crystals.
The products, after being submitted successively to the president of the assembly and the academic body, were passed from hand to hand by the public.
Ho-wey-hu had climbed up to sit down in the place of honor reserved for him to the right of the president, and modestly received the congratulations that his colleagues came in turn to offer him.
At the end of the memorable session, the Académie des Sciences unanimously adopted the following resolutions:
Item One. The illustrious scientist Ho-wey-hu, President of the Academy of Sciences of Honolulu, is a great credit to humankind.
Item Two. The Institut de France considers as an honor the first communication of the great discovery of the transformation of matter.
Item Three. The Académie des Sciences confers the title of honorary member on the inventor.
Item Four. A special committee will be set up immediately to examine the endeavor.
XXIX. The Palace of Opulence
Four o’clock was chiming as Herber and his guests came down the monumental stairway of the Institut. Having extracted themselves, with some difficulty, from the immense crowd that extended from the threshold of the edifice al the way to the quay, the travelers, guided by the schoolmaster, went into the avenue that overlooked the lake and followed its shore.
“It’s time, Messieurs, to go to Guillaume Dryon’s palace, which is situated a few hundred meters from here,” said the schoolmaster. “I told him that we would arrive at half past four.”
After walking along the shore for five minutes, the strangers and their guide turned into a vast avenue lined by a quadruple row of enormous trees, whose branches overlapped ten meters above the ground and formed a vault impenetrable to the sun’s rays. An artificial stream, swiftly flowing and as clear as crystal, ran alongside the entire extent of the pathway, of an incomparable charm and splendor.
The travelers were wonderstruck. For five minutes Gédéon had been reeling off an exceedingly pompous dithyramb about the beauty of the landscape, when he was interrupted by the schoolmaster, who said: “Messieurs, we have arrived.”
He turned right; his companions followed him. Twenty paces further on he stopped and, with evident satisfaction, displayed a magnificent palace, which stood beyond a gently-sloping flower bed decorated with infinite artistry. He continued walking, escorting his guests to the threshold of the edifice.
A man of grave and dignified appearance, who appeared to be waiting for the visitors, suddenly emerged from the vestibule and came to bow to them respectfully.
“Monsieur Dryon is in the park at present, waiting for these Messieurs,” the individual aid. “I shall have the honor of taking them to him.”
“Thank you for your benevolent offer, Master Steward, but we can easily find the master of the house ourselves,” Herber replied.
The steward bowed. The four men went through the vestibule. At the back of the entrance hall, a cyclopean stairway of unpolished marble leaden with sculptures and vases overflowing with rare flowers led up to the first floor. The schoolmaster and the strangers went into a broad lateral corridor whose depth seemed infinite.
After twenty paces the visitors turned left and found themselves in a doorway as high and wide as a cathedral porch.
A magical scene unfolded before their eyes.
An immense park, in which all the marvels of nature and art were accumulated, extended before them. The rarest plants of the tropical zone formed entire thickets there. In the background, a large sheet of water, falling like a compact mass from a height of thirty feet, flowed into the garden in two sinuous streams, resplendent in the rays of the setting sun. A ring of giant trees, originally from the highlands of Central Africa, formed a majestic frame for the marvelous scene.
After a few moments of mute contemplation, the strangers, preceded by the schoolmaster, went down on to the lawn that extended before them, and, after having crossed a white marble bridge, advanced along the central pathway.
At the sound of their footsteps, a tall man of imposing aspect sitting on a grassy bank with his back against a giant cedar slowly rose to his feet and came toward them.
“Here’s our host,” said Herber, in a low voice.
On recognizing the schoolmaster, Guillaume Dryon’s noble face lit up with a smile. He greeted the strangers benevolently.
“Messieurs,” he said to them, “I’m both gladdened and honored by your visit, and I’m enormously grateful to my dear friend Herber for the idea of putting me in touch with you.”
“These Messieurs,” the schoolmaster replied, “are originally from Oceania. Paying a first visit to our country, of which they have studied the scientific progress and social condition for a long time, they were initially lost on arriving in Paris. A fortuitous incident brought them to my abode. Every day I have been able to appreciate the elevation of their character and the depth of their knowledge. As the pursuit of their mission seems constantly to preoccupy their minds, I thought that they would find in your vast collections and library the elements they require. They would be glad, at the same time, to repay your generosity by collaborating with your scientific endeavors.”
“Your friends are mine,” rep
lied Guillaume Dryon, extending his hand to the strangers. “I’ve read with great interest the magnificent lectures they gave on the 19th century and would be honored to count men of such profound erudition among the dearest guests of my house. I will ask them right now, as an enormous favor, to undertake the temporary direction of the African museums I have recently built, from which my work increasingly takes me away.”
Antius took the floor and, in terms that were both warm and elevated, he expressed his gratitude and that of his friends.
Guillaume Dryon led his guests to a belvedere elevated by a few meters, from which the gaze could embrace the entire extent of the marvelous Eden that surrounded them. Several armchairs were distributed in the shade. In response to the invitation of the master of the house, everyone sat down.
The conversation turned to politics. At the doctor’s request, the Parisian delegate to the Estates General gave a summary account of the latest session of the European parliament. In detailing one by one the various questions that had been considered, Dryon showed that he possessed an indisputable authority on all the relevant matters.
The orator then established an eloquent comparison between the political institutions of old Europe and those of the African federal states. He was able to demonstrate to his listeners that the men designated by their fellow citizens for the regulation of public affairs had only one objective: incessant progress, from both the double viewpoint of the material and the moral.
The conversation was interrupted by the solemn approach of a majordomo, who announced that several guests had already arrived.
Guillaume Dryon got up and headed for the palace, followed by his guests. He took them into a vast summer room hung with colorful fabrics and furnished with exquisite taste. A dozen people were already gathered there. Among them, four young ladies dressed with extreme elegance were plying their fans with consummate artistry.
The host went to present his respects to them first. Having then offered his hand to each of the illustrious individuals who surrounded him, he introduced the strangers as guests of the palace.