Suddenly, flame sprang forth and spirals of smoke extended over the crowd. The awning of the Café Riche had caught fire and the building too, fires having been ignited in several places by the blasters. The shrill cries of “Allah! Allah! Allah!” resounded triumphantly, drowning out the last few cries of “Anarchism for ever!” and “Liberty!” from the burning café.
The crowded eventually got out of the way, and we were carried by its last remnants along a road parallel to the Cannebière, towards the old port.
“Will we have time to eat, my love?” asked Raymonde, while we drank a very necessary tonic on the terrace of a quayside bar facing the ancient Phocian Lacydon.
“What’s the hurry, darling? Isn’t it sufficient that we arrive before nightfall? Let’s go to Cassis. It’ll take us two hours at the most in one of those pretty motor-boats that are waiting for us at the water’s edge, bobbing in the sunlight.”
She shook her head, with a soft smile, and pointed upwards at the smoke from the fire. Borne by a gentle breeze, it was coming down the Cannebière in thick clouds and drifting out to sea above the port and the ferry. “As you can see, my dear, we’re scarcely 200 or 300 meters way, and the fire might reach the restaurant before we’ve had dessert. The entire quarter could go up like a box of matches. There are no more firemen, no more rescue-helicopters, or anything else. It’s the end of the world, isn’t it?”
I looked deep into her larkspur-blue eyes. They were serious; she wasn’t joking. I shivered as I saw that my beloved, too, was yielding to the contagion of carefree madness that was carrying Marseilles away—doubtless along with the rest of the world—in a vertiginous whirlwind. Then, as if some kind of switch had suddenly been tripped inside my head, the observation she had just made seemed to me to be exquisitely funny. Yes, indeed—it was the end of the world! It was a matter of not stupidly wasting the few hours of respite that separated us from the Martian red death. What did it matter, anyway—we would perish together! For the moment, we should enjoy ourselves!
The restaurant was next door to the bar, where I paid with my last loose change. Before seating us at our table, however, the manager led me politely to the money-changer on the key, an old owl-faced Armenian who accepted my watermarked banknotes issued by the Directorate and gave me in return a few “Labour Bonds of the Revolutionary Committee of Marseilles,” crudely printed in white on black paper. Since the day before, the manager told me, these had virtually become the only acceptable currency; in the popular quarters, in fact, payments were more often made in foodstuffs: kilos of sugar, liters of wine, bars of chocolate, oranges or watermelon quarters.
The menu was execrable and very sketchy. The spectacles that had unfolded before our eyes during the last two hours were hardly calculated to encourage an appetite, but the mellow intoxication of our tête-à-tête and the prospect of thirty-six hours of liberty restored our serenity once we were installed in a relatively pleasant corner. The nameless stew of glutinous leftovers that was represented as “blanquette de veau” and three wretched potatoes that arrived, watery wine, and a thin slice of crumbling camembert, made an adorable snack.
“Anyway,” I said, “if we’re still hungry—look at this!” I produced from my waistcoat pocket a box containing the first samples of the Jovian synthetic nutriment, which had arrived at the Directorate that very morning—and I proceeded to swallow one of the large pills, by way of dessert. One might have taken it for chewing gum.
“You’ll give yourself indigestion!” my companion joked. Then, more seriously: “Let’s hang on to them. Who knows whether we’ll be able to eat tonight?”
She had not expressed any such doubt that morning, but our journey through Marseilles had been singularly instructive. The hour we spent at the restaurant, facing the busy quayside, showed us several further novelties.
The illusion generated by the idleness of the holiday, and by our secret optimism, had become fugitive. The funnels and masts of deserted boats were mirrored in the waters of the harbor, as if swollen by the heat; the crowd, impelled into the streets by avid curiosity despite the siesta, was milling around distractedly. Processions were passing in the distance, playing their music and displaying their banners.
There was even an authentic procession of the faithful, which filed along the quay, several thousand strong, singing hymns: an entire clergy decked out with sparkling gold Catholic ornaments, venerable tonsured heads bare despite the deadly Sun; an archbishop under a canopy giving out blessings; a holy sacrament amid the clouds of incense; and an enormous reliquary, a monument wrought in gold and silver, crushing 20 robust carriers beneath its weight, who were substituted every 100 paces. A mystical fervor transfigured every face; women were weeping and sobbing; and young curates with powerful voices were circulating along the procession’s length, directing the hymns and intoning the responses of litanies that mounted towards Heaven in explosions of delirious fervor: “Pray for us, Sainte Martine! Have pity on us, Sainte Martine! Sainte Martine, deliver us from the Martians!”
This lamentable invocation sprang from the throats of all the faithful, and the people watching them pass by joined in, including the diners around us, reminded of the desperation of the situation.
Little girls dressed in white and crowned with roses, marching behind the main procession, distributed scapulars and medals bearing the effigy of the saint, which had been blessed, as an infallible antidote to the Martian threat.
Profane amulets were abundant too. A hawker came round the restaurant tables, offering them. Their efficacy seemed did not seem to be in doubt, for I recognized a varied assortment of good luck charms in the peddler’s tray—little pigs, No. 13s, miniature helicopters, and so on—that I had seen in numerous buttonholes, and which I had taken for simple badges…badges of the general madness, yes, and of the clouding of heads unanimously returned to the grossest superstitions!
As for the other side of the panic, the rage to forget and the delirium of pleasure-seeking, ten leaflets for dance-halls and cinemas were handed out to us: the Ciné-Mars…eille was offering a program in which the comic and the cynically obscene alternated with newsreels: “The Torpedoing of Chicago;” “The Rescue Airfleet of Nice;” “Dancing in the Final Hours;” “The Academy of New Dances: the Torpillette and the Satanita;” “Dervishes Dancing”—and so on…
Meanwhile, the smoke continued to flow, thickening all the while, above the old harbor, coming from the burning Café Riche and numerous other buildings, which had caught fire in succession in the absence of any remedy. Distant clamors and dull explosions reached us in burst from the Cannebière. A cohort of the Black Guard, with shouldered blasters, emerged from the Rue de la République at a quick pace, heading towards the disaster…and the loot. Louts with criminal faces were coming the other way, loaded down with booty of various sorts, which they displayed to one another, jeering: silver snuff-boxes, clocks, objets d’art. Some, with bottles filling their pockets and under their arms, were balancing others on their heads.
As our meal drew to a close, all the people coming from the Cannebière, including the honest families of working men on strike or bourgeois folk, were carrying “souvenirs” of looted shops, laughing heartily, fathers, mothers and children alike loaded down with costly trinkets or functional items: pairs of shoes, umbrellas, packs of cigarettes, bicycle-wheels, baby-carriages, sickbeds…
Banknotes issued by the Banque de France, now mere pieces of paper, were strewn on the pavement.
The sensation generated around us by the fit of coughing that suddenly seized one of the waitresses reminded me that I had forgotten about the “Martianitis.” And yet that word—the official name of the “Martian bronchitis”—was displayed on every street corner, on the hoardings of emergency clinics, in pharmacist’s windows, on the Red Cross ambulances that carried the victims of contagion away amid the reek of phenol. But the vertigo of carelessness—in which we were almost caught up—had become so universal in those demented days that no one wo
rried any more about their comings and goings. Only the use of blasters caused an unambiguous movement of recoil. There was more physical revulsion than mortal dread in the circle that formed around the waitress, who had slumped into a chair, shaken by spasms of coughing, her face blue.
“Are you afraid, Raymonde?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said, without taking her eyes off the agonized girl, who was being gently propped up by a bearded priest in a white robe and colonial helmet—but her fingers clenched about my hand, and she added: “What a hideous way to go, beloved! Let’s get out of here!”
Our ridiculous meal cost me a terrifying quantity of “hours of work” as imprinted by the CRM, and I wondered anxiously what price the boatmen would demand to transport us to Cassis.
The ancient clock on the Eglise des Accoules, overlooking the Italian quarter, was chiming 2 p.m. The flagstones on the quay were roasting the soles of our shoes, and eddies of acrid smoke, scented with burning leather and rubber, made the stifling heat of the fiery Sun even more painful. Our gazes wandered indecisively over the crews of motorized yawls, petrol-driven dinghies and rowing boats that seeming to be awaiting, as in former times, the pleasure of amateur sailors.
“Sea trips from here, ladies and gentlemen, inexpensive, two people at a time!” the master of a little coaster called out to us, removing his lips from the neck of a bottle enclosed in wickerwork, while his two sailors put down their soup-spoons to mimic the acting of plying the oars.
Despite their piratical sunburned faces, I was about to accept the offer of an unexpectedly good bargain when my companion whispered: “Oh, no—not them, I implore you!”
She dragged me towards a wretched sloop, from which an old sea-dog wearing a scarlet Genoese cap with a black lining favored us with a paternal wink.
“Day trips from here! Take you as far as you want to go. Payment negotiable. Just climb aboard.”
And we climbed aboard, without discussing the thorny question of price. The anchor was lifted, the oars groaned in their rowlocks, and we were glad to see the quay grow more distant. The reflections of the reddening Sun danced on the wavelets in the harbor.
“Do you know what you’re doing? Mark me, you’ve had a lucky escape.” The old salt confided to us that the crew of the “inexpensive” coaster was armed, ready for anything, and that it had begun by taking a dozen cargoes of refugees out to sea during the catastrophe at Nice, one after another.
“To sea, lady and gentleman—and they left them there, you understand, to come back in search of others at the end of the pier…and it’s just the same here with their ‘sea trips’—no one ever comes back.”
Raymonde, her lovely blue eyes wide with horror, was about to reply when a great clamor went up to starboard, with the characteristic hiss of blasters. A dense mob was astir on the quay. Almost immediately, a thunderous column of fire issued from a huge petrol-tanker painted with red lead, whose mizzen-mast collapsed on the fleeing men, and a flood of burning liquid poured down on to a disemboweled ship at the mouth of the harbor, threatening to cut off our retreat.
“What a bunch of hooligans those Black Guards are!” grumbled the old mariner, redoubling his vigor. What’s the point of that—what they just did? Tell me, boss, do you know how to swim? What about rowing? Yes? Then get a move on, with that other pair of oars. Help me, or we’re shafted.” 8
Thanks to our desperate efforts, we escaped. But we were still under the ferry-bridge, and the entire width and breath of the harbor was nothing but a sheet of fire. The wind, fortunately, was veering to the mistral, blowing densest smoke obliquely towards the lighthouse. New explosions were going up from boats reached by the fire; cries to port and starboard advertised the commencement of the pillage.
Beyond the transporter-bridge—finally out of danger!—we caught the wind and released the oars. With my painfully blistered hands I helped our boatman raise the sail, which drew us rapidly out into the open sea.
A piece of paper danced in the air in front of me. I succeeded in grabbing hold of it, and we saw that the air was full of other fluttering white sheets—the last packet dropped by a helicopter in flight that had been distributing them over the southern district: a black helicopter whose flanks bore the emblem of the Revolution: the skull-and-crossbones.
I resumed my place beside Raymonde, who was letting her hand dangle in the foam bubbling up along the side of the boat. We read it together.
The Terrestrial Directorate informs the population that a cosmogram received from the planet Jupiter identifies the city of Marseilles as the impact-point of the next torpedo launched by Mars. The catastrophe will occur on the night of July 20. The message recommends that everyone flee, immediately, and that recommendation is endorsed!
Underneath were the signatures of Gideon Botram and Ladislas Wronsky, quite skillfully forged.
“What a vile thing to do!” cried Raymonde, who also saw through the Anarchists’ ruse. “To make the entire population flee, so that they can pillage at their leisure! Oh, my God! These men are worse monsters than the Martians!”
The sacrilegious sheet trembled in the wind between our fingers. I let go of it, numb with shock, wondering what would become of the Palais de la Garde and Gideon Botram, the “Antichrist,” the last mainstay of the dying civilization.
“Humankind is committing suicide,” I said, in a low voice.
Our old mariner launched a long jet of saliva into the blue sea, switched his wad of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other, and said: “Bah! When dolphins are caught in the net with the tuna, the dolphins devour the tuna instead of joining forces with them so that they can all get out. We’re all in the net together, now!”
VIII. The Cassis Soviet
The fresh saline breeze rustled in the saffron-colored sail deployed against the satin sky. The rocking of our vessel on the crystalline blue waves gradually soothed our nerves. The golden Virgin sparkling on top of the Palais de la Garde and the amphitheatre of the city, half-veiled by smoke, finally disappeared behind the dazzling calcareous pyramid of the Île Riou; the vertiginous tumult of Marseilles ceased buzzing in our ears like the thousand confused voices of a folly-filled conch-shell.
Our eyes, resting from the sight of human agitation, studied the pleasant retreats of the coasts desirously. As wild and deserted as they were 25 centuries ago, when the Phocian migrants arrived, the coves with strange Ligurian names, which the old salt counted off—Sormiou, Morgiou, Sugiton—opened their narrow and profound creeks within the tall, white and bare cliffs, like fjords strayed into the sunny Mediterranean.
Outside the demented civilization, snuggling in the depths of a bay more harmoniously “composed” than the scenery of an opera, between a long promontory of red ochre and white hills half-clad in large stands of pine trees—how peaceful the little port of Cassis seemed to us, from a distance! What pleasant idleness radiated from those pink villas, among the vine-covered slopes and the olive groves, and the quay with its little houses, painted in all the colors of the rainbow and the dawn! Even today, life still offered the prospect of a few indulgent and lazy hours in the cool shade of the plane-trees in that miniature town square.
So, leaving our philosophical mariner satisfied with a few Directorial banknotes—which would, a few months earlier, have paid for a passage to India for both of us—we set of in search of a hotel in which to spend our all-too-brief vacation, begun under such sober auspices.
The first attempt, on the edge of the harbor, was scarcely encouraging. There was nothing available; every room, to the smallest dark cupboard, was packed with refugees from Nice or fugitives who had fled the revolutionary panic in Marseilles. It was impossible to obtain anything to eat; there had been no bread since the previous day, and all comestibles had been requisitioned by the municipal authority. We would not find a room anywhere, the hotelier assured us, not even in private residences or the night-shelter.
The dense crowd swarming in the square, in the shade of
the plane-trees, confirmed this opinion, reviving our memories of Marseilles. What madness, under the influence of the contagious radiation ravaging all humanity, had transfigured all these troubled faces simultaneously, like a fit of tragic decision?
We would soon find out.
A drum-roll resounded. The crowed moved back under the forceful pressure of 30 or so young men emerging from a side-street to the left: the Black Guardsmen, with their blasters and sweat-covered faces, were here too! The Hydra of Anarchism, which was thought to have been killed off one and for all when the scientific and rational dictatorship had put an end to the gigantic experiment instituted in anima vili by the Russian bolshevists, was triumphant everywhere; it extended its tentacles into the smallest village; with the aid of the Martians, it had conquered the world with dizzying rapidity.
In the fearful semi-circle opened up by the black cohort, bristling with sparkling reflectors, an old man with a vulpine face and steely eyes appeared, mounted on a flight of steps. He was clad in dirty khaki from head to toe and girdled by a funereal sash bearing a fateful silver skull flanked with the letters S.C. Despite the absolute silence—the sea could be heard softly lapping on the shingle, and the purr of a motor high in the sky—the drum-roll sounded again, and the old man read out, in a mordant and venomous tone:
“In the name of human Fraternity and collective utility, the Soviet of Cassis is hereby instituted, with absolute power over the entire territory of the ex-commune, including property of every sort and the individuals of both sexes who happen to be within its bounds at the time of the promulgation of this decree.
“Article One: habitants domiciled in the ex-commune, and they alone, are declared members of the Soviet of Cassis.
“Article Two, Clause One: Access to and abode within the Soviet’s territory are forbidden to all foreign non-members of the Soviet, whether refugees, escapees or others.
The Martian Epic Page 9