There is a certain unfairness in comparing Ballanche’s futuristic fiction with the other works included here, the distinction between them being greater than that between chalk and cheese, let alone apples and pears, but it is, nevertheless, worth raising the question of which one of them is most perspicacious, not in the relatively trivial matter of anticipating future developments in the human condition, but in analyzing that condition fruitfully and accurately. Ballanche’s assessment of our ordeals is in deadly earnest, while his rivals’ are flippantly farcical (and, in Jullien’s case, a trifle risqué), but in the quest to represent existential experience and recommend an appropriate ethical stance in respect of it, Ballanche is not merely an also ran but finishes last by a distance. That is the whole point of attempting to follow Bodin’s prospectus, no matter what difficulties are involved in doing so.
The following translation of Théophile Gautier’s “Paris futur” was taken from the Google Books version of the third edition of the collection Caprices et Zigzags published by Hachette in 1865. The translation of Arsène Houssaye’s “Paris futur” was taken from the Google Books version of the anthology Paris et les parisiens au XIXe siècle by Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Arsène Houssaye et al. published by Morizot in 1856 and the gallica version of the 25 août 1889 issue of La Grande Revue. Paris et Saint-Pétersbourg. The translation of Victor Fournel’s “Paris futur” was taken from the Google Books version of Paris nouveau et Paris futur published by Jacques Lecoffre in 1865. The translation of Alfred Franklin’s Les Ruines de Paris en 4875 was taken from the gallica version of the book published by Léon Willem in 1875. The translation of Maurice Spronck’s L’An 330 de la République was taken from the gallica version of the book published by Léon Chailley in 1894. The translation of Jean Jullien’s Enquête sur le monde futur was taken from the gallica version of the book published by Bibliothèque Charpentier in 1909. The translation of La Vision d’Hébal, chef d’un clan écosssais, tiré de La Ville des expiations was taken from the Google Books version of the book published by Jules Didot aîné in 1834.
Brian Stableford
Théophile Gautier: Future Paris
(1851)
Paris is infinitely self-obsessed; it regards itself, with the greatest naivety, as the center, the eye and the navel of the universe. It scarcely admits that anything exists outside of itself. It knows, vaguely, that there is a little dot on maps, which the English call London, on the edge of a thin twisted thread that the English call the Thames, but it does not worry about that, and calmly awards itself the crown of civilization. Give a pure-blooded Parisian a square of vellum, a pen and colors, and say to him: “Make me a sketch of the map of the world!” and he will do it like a citizen of the Celestial Empire; Paris will take up almost all the available space, and the other kingdoms, drowned in semi-darkness, will only figure as memoranda, like those unknown or unexplored countries that geographers indicate by dotted lines.
That comes from one thing: that Paris, like the good bourgeois it is, never goes out of the house, or, if it does go out, hardly ever goes beyond the fortifications. Versailles is its Timbuktu. To which you will reply that if Paris never goes out, it is because it is perfectly comfortable at home. The objection is specious, although it is not unjustified. Paris, intoxicated with itself, always has its nose pressed up against a mirror, like a myopic person shaving, with the idea of making his portrait more attractive. How many publications in prose, verse, engraving and lithography has Paris not produced, in order that no feature of its precious physiognomy should be lost?
It is a pity that paradox—the green fruit that, ripened by time, can become the truth!—has gone out of fashion; we shall develop one that, although seeming strange at first glance, is no less veracious. It is that Paris does not exist.
We know full well that by searching, one will find on the banks of the Seine a few small heaps of plaster that, strictly speaking, form alleyways of a sort, whose aggregation might, if necessary, constitute what ne generally has the habit of calling a city. Piganiol, Sainte-Foix, Dulaure and many others have compiled the history of that pretentious rubble in approximately-quarto volumes,6 but histories do not prove anything; only fairy tales are true.
What impure candles, what hunchbacked, gummed-up, surly, unhealthy, counterfeit houses covered in leprosies and warts, devoid of air, devoid of light and devoid of sunshine, unworthy of being inhabited by rabbits or pigs! The kraals of Hottentots, which one enters on all fours, the caves of Troglodytes, and the huts of Laplanders and Greenlanders, half buried in the snow, jaundiced by a perpetual smoke of half-rotten fish, are pleasant places by comparison! Three out of four streets are no more than gutters of black mud, as in the times of the frankest barbarity. No trace of art, no elegance, no sense of alignment; plaster boxes pierces by square holes, surmounted by frightful metal chimneys—those is what are known as nineteenth-century houses, in a city that claims to be the modern Athens, the queen of civilization! Truly, one is tempted to desire that some Nero might take it into his head to offer himself a representation of the burning of Troy by setting fire to the city, which is made of bricks and ought to be made of marble!
Talk to me about Nineveh and Babylon! They deserve to be called cities; they raise a commendable profile on the horizon for you. But in those days, constitutional government had not been invented; gunpowder, printing and steam were unknown; no one held forth on the subject of progress.
Often, when I stroll in some somber plain at dusk, and the livid horizon is cluttered by great banks of cloud, heaped on top of one another like the blocks of an immense aerial city fallen into ruins, Babylonian dreams come to me, and phantasmagorias in the style of Martin7 pass before my eyes.
I begin by carving gigantic trenches out of the flanks of distant hills for the foundations of edifices; soon, the angles of frontons are sketched in the vapor; pyramids cut out their marble faces; obelisks rise up in a single jet, like granite exclamation marks; immeasurable palaces are elevated in superimpositions of retreating terraces like a colossal staircase, which only giants of the pre-Adamite world could climb.
I see stout columns extending, as strong as towers, fluted with spiral grooves in which six men could hide, friezes made of sections of mountains and covered with monstrous zodiacs and menacing hieroglyphs; the arches of bridges curving over a river that gleams throughout the city it traverses like a Damascene sword in a half-cut pass; lakes of salt water in which domesticated leviathans leap, shining in a radiant light, and the great golden circle of Ozymandias sparkling like a wheel detached from the chariot of the sun.
Bathed at its base in the ardent russet mist thrown up by the restless activity of the city, seething with work of pleasure, the temple of Belus8 invades the sky, where it will challenges the lightning, by means of eight convulsive efforts, each of which produces an enormous tower taller than the steeple of Strasbourg or the pyramid of Giza; the cloud cut its sides with their stripes and the entablatures of the final stage are blanched by threads of eternal snow.
Other temples are also inscribe their severe and magnificent forms on the horizon, whose grandeur only serves to make the enormity of the temple of Belus stand out more sharply; and in the background, in the incandescent redness of the sunset, one divines the dismantled silhouette of Lylac,9 the colossus of pride, the walls of which the Ancient of Days has caused to crack by setting his hand on its summit as on an excessively weak staff. The flames of the evening filter through the cracks, through which behemoths and mastodons pass without brushing their carapaces, and create the most bizarre plays of light; one might think that a conflagration were trying to devour the formidable ruin that the wrath of God has not entirely cast down, and whose summit still rises above the waters of a new Deluge.
Here and there, the black chaos of buildings lights up; basalt sphinxes display their hindquarters and stretch out their claws on granite pedestals, forming an avenue a league long at the door of some palace. Above the rooftops, in the mi
dst of the crowns of palm trees and baobabs, surges the trunk of a bronze elephant, blowing a jet of water into the air, which the wind scatters into fine pearls and silvery mist. Ramps go up and down, tracing angles on the flanks of terraces; the prows of ships, the tips of masts and antennae betray the presence of canals; staircase-streets bring daylight into the crowd of edifices, and in the distance, according to the hazards of perspective, the girdling walls appear, creating a roadway three hundred meters from the ground, in with six or eight teams of four might gallop abreast.
That, at least, bears some resemblance to a city, and stands out jaggedly against the background of the sky. Cause the shadows of passing clouds to soar over it, in order that the scene might be complete, like prodigious black eagles; strike with unexpected gleams the formicary of the multitudes that crowd the squares, the crossroads and the external doorways; cause caravans to unfurl in the plains of sand, like the coils of infinite serpents, laden with the treasures of all the worlds, and enthrone, in the center of the grandiose city, a king as powerful as a God, as feared as a God, and invisible as a God, by the name of Tiglath-Pileser, Merodach-Baladan or Belshazzar,10 who, by his enormities, will force the Eternal to write on his walls!
A city like that plunges as far into the ground as it rises into the air; its roots go in search of the nucleus of the world and only stop when they arrive at the surfaces of interior lakes or the furnace of the central fire. Beneath the living city extends the dead city, the black city of motionless inhabitants. Broad ventilation-shafts, gaping like the mouths of Hell, lead to the region of crypts and syringes.11 Funereal tribes labor in the vomitory cities, tribes of gravediggers, the slaves of death; those who melt the natrum and the bitumen in boilers; those who weave the mortuary bandages; the coffin-makers, the painters, the gilders and the sculptors of tombs—all those whose works will never see the light of day, and who trace inscriptions by the yellow light of a lamp that lacks air that are immediately covered by shadow and will only ever be read by sightless eyes.
That crepuscular population, which has no communication with the upper city except for the corpses that it receives, could fill a city larger than Rome; they are born, they marry and they die in that obscurity. There are vanquished nations there, forced to re-enter the earth and cede their place in the sun to the victorious people; the necropolis whose threshold they inhabit is the work of vanished races, and its immensity frightens even the most audacious Babylonian architects.
There are interminable corridors, all lined with panels of hieroglyphs and cosmogonic bas-reliefs, leading to pits as black as the abyss and as profound, into which one descends by means of bronze crampons. There are chambers hollowed out of the living rock, the center of which is occupied by enormous sarcophagi of basalt and porphyry, without anyone being able to comprehend how they were brought here; rooms in which torches cannot illuminate the depths, where entire cycles of generations, complete reigns with their princes, their mages, their poets, their soldiers, their horses and their war-elephants sleep, with their backs to columns sustaining ceilings that one cannot see, so high are they.
The further one descends, the more the mummies take on gigantic proportions and strange physiognomies. Under the pale brown of balm unknown profiles are designed, with features as if carved with blows of a hatchet in blocks of stone; faces reminiscent of the muzzles of primitive animals; foreheads in which the wrinkles seem to be streaks of lightning or the beds of torrents; unvanquished limbs that corruption dares not attack, and the muscles of which are tangled like the beams of a scaffold. One can see there the companions of Nimrod, primitive hunters who drew bows made from the jawbones of whales, and fought hand-to-hand with mastodons, the paleotherium, the dinotherium and all those colossal and monstrous beasts produced by an earth intoxicated by strength and youth, which, if they had lived, would have ended up devouring the world.
The contemporaries of Chronos and Xixuthros12 repose in the inferior circles into which no one ever descends, because it requires lungs more powerful than those of present generations to tolerate the air, impregnated with the bitter perfumes of the sepulcher. The secrets that envelop those mysterious tombs are lost, or only known to the old men of the subterranean people, so laden down with years that no one any longer understands heir archaic language. Below them are couched the kings who lived before Adam, but the crust of the earth has thickened so much since their death that they lie at an incalculable depth, and it is as if they had become the bones of the world.
Is that not a necropolis superior to Père-Lachaise, the cemetery of Montmartre, etc., etc?—where we cannot leave our dead to sleep peacefully for more than seven years, where the phrase concession à perpetuité is a true derision and signifies no more than the “always” of lovers;13 where the tombs are veritable playthings devoid of sadness, dignity and grandeur, and which give rise to the belief that a population of dwarfs is interred there, so meager are their proportions and so miserly the space allotted to them. But we have no greater understanding of death than of life, and, under the pretext of progress, we shall soon have gone back four or five thousand years. The imprint of Adam’s foot, which can still be seen in the rock of the isle of Serendip, is nine handbreadths long! We have degenerated somewhat since.
Enormous as the ancient world was, however, and no matter to what depth we have lowered what we call civilization, there will be the means—and the future will doubtless make use of them—to build a greater city, more beautiful and more exotic than Babylon, Nineveh and Persepolis: to surpass, in reality, the most frenzied audacities and the most extravagant deliria of Piranesi and Martin; and, if you will permit, we shall try to sketch it out for you.
For an initial assumption, permit us to pass a steam-roller over present-day Paris, which will crush its houses and its monuments and make it a perfectly uniform plateau; then we shall broaden the Seine, hollow out its bed and bring the Ocean to our threshold. Any city that cannot take a foot-bath in the sea is unworthy of the name. Ships impregnated with the perfumes of India and Java will come, like weary horses that nonchalantly lean their necks on the necks of their companions in harness, to support their bowsprits and sculpted prows on the granite quays of future Paris, From the present location of the Pont Royal one will see a host of masts, rigging and crossbeams more complex than a virgin forest in America; one will see entire fleets arriving and departing with sails unfurled or towed by steamboats: all the movement of the most active seaport.
There will only be a single church, which will occupy the location of the Panthéon. It will be consecrated to the Divinity. That unique church will have immeasurable proportions; the entire Latin mountain, carved into steps, will serve as its staircase. Its towers and cupolas will make such a profound dent in the border of the sky that the stars will bloom like golden acanthus flowers on the capitals of the upper floor. Notre-Dame would be able to enter throughout the giant porch without ducking her head.
In that hybrid temple, all the architectures of the past, present and future will be concentrated: one will find there, in the most knowledgeable forms, the granitic vertigos of Ellora and Karnak, the desperate aspirations of the ogives of the cathedral of Seville; the Gothic spire, the Byzantine cupola and the Oriental minaret will form harmonious chords in that symphony of stone, sung to God by an entire people. The myths of Genesis, the allegories of the fall and the redemption, the remuneration of good and the punishment of sins, the symbols of the celestial powers, executed in mosaic, will cover the walls in warm and rich hues. Gold will scintillate on the interior walls with a profusion worthy of the Incas; a population of statues will animate the friezes, the niches, the inter-columnar intervals and the scroll-work of doorways.
Instead of bells, whose bronze capsules only produce a lugubrious and monotonous psalmody, towers of immense organs will be established, with pipes as long as the column in the Place Vendôme, whose bellows will be activated by eight-hundred-horse-power steam engines. Religious music, expressly composed, will
be played at different hours of the day, and whirlwinds of harmony will pass over the city, dominating all its rumors and reminding the distracted crowd of the idea of God. Inside the temple, vaults disposed according to the laws of acoustics will give a marvelous sonority to the sacred canticles; the preacher, from the height of his giant pulpit, aided by telephone, will exhale the divine breath like one of those great angels with clarions whom painters depict in Last Judgments, as if from the edge of a cloud.
Although Gothic cathedrals are beautiful, it is permissible to believe that an edifice summarizing the three hundred churches of Paris in one would offer the eyes a silhouette even bolder and more surprising. The unity of God will be more clearly manifest in the unity of the temple, and his omnipotence in the formidable mass of the ensemble. You might raise the objection of the distance that many of the faithful would find themselves living from the house of the Lord, but future means of locomotion will be improved to such a degree that what seems to us to be a long distance today will be devoured with a rapidity scarcely appreciable by thought!
Investigations of the Future Page 2