MARTYRS OF SCIENCE
A HEAVENWARD VOYAGE
In 1803, in the city of Altona, the capital of Holstein, there was a scientist named Ludwig Klopstock. When I say scientist, I am not expressing the general opinion of his fellow citizens in that regard, for they generally claimed that the poor fellow possessed no other merit and no other ability than bearing the great name of Klopstock. His sole entitlement to interest, according to them, consisted of being the nephew of the author of the Messias.24
In appearance, at least, Ludwig justified the low esteem in which he was held. Always distracted and dreamy, he sought out solitary places, spent hours with his eyes raised toward the heavens, had no fixed meal-times, and had no idea how to earn an écu by means of his labor. He lived as best he could on the modest returns of a farm that he owned in the village of Oltenzen, and an annual income of about eight hundred livres, produced by capital invested with a merchant in Pallmailstrasse. At any rate, neither his meditations in the open air nor his uninterrupted twelve-hour sessions in the study in which he locked himself away had ever produced the slightest known result. Whenever he was asked what he was doing among his scientific instruments, or what he saw through the large telescope installed on the roof of his house, he became disconcerted, blushing and stammering, and the questioner went away shrugging his shoulders, convinced that Ludwig was nothing but an imbecile.
This conviction became even more unanimous in Altona when it was learned that Ludwig Klopstock was going to marry. His marriage must, indeed, have seems very singular, for the young woman that the poor scientist was marrying was an orphan of sixteen; the death of her father had left her abandoned and destitute.
In spite of the mockery of all those who knew about his plan, Ludwig led his bride to the altar. Ebba took over the management of the scientist’s household; order and propriety—which had been banished from the residence for some time, if they had ever entered it—flourished therein, and gave the desolate dwelling a cheerful and celebratory appearance.
Ludwig himself appeared in the city in clean linen, stocking without holes and garment that did not disappear in myriads of stains of all colors. His pallid complexion and livid thinness gradually gave way to a plumpness that gave his appearance a freshness and gaiety. He was still seen, every evening and well into the night, taking long walks in the country, but, instead of wandering at hazard, he was guided—or rather led—by Ebba. With her gaze directed at the ground, while her husband kept hers raised toward the heavens, she sustained him, after a fashion, like the angels of which the psalm speaks, in order that his feet should not be injured by the pebbles of the path.
Gradually, Ebba’s figure rounded out, and one morning, Ludwig, sitting by his life’s bed with his eyes full of tears, heard a little child utter that first cry, which causes so much emotion in a paternal heart. From then on, the scientist devoted himself less exclusively to science; he even forgot his telescope in order to dandle the new-born on his knees; he looked out with greater patience and greater happiness for the little creature’s smile than he had ever done in discovering the mysterious conjunction of two stars.
The child grew; he was as beautiful as his mother, and his broad forehead indicated to Ludwig the promise of a powerful intelligence. Simply to say that concern was manifest around the crib in which the pale angel slept would be an understatement. Ebba gazed at him incessantly and Ludwig’s calculations were confused by the slightest cry emitted by the infant’s rosy little mouth. Alas, one night, the child’s respiration became halting, his gaze lit up with a strange flame, and his cheeks became red. He had the croup! When day dawned, there was no longer anything but a cadaver on Ebba’s bosom.
The poor mother thought of dying herself. It would surely have been better if God had reunited her body with that of her baby son in the same grave, as he had reunited their souls in Heaven. Ebba’s soul never came back down to Earth. Her body acted at hazard; her voice no longer proffered any but inconsequential words. She was an idiot.
Ludwig’s friends advised him to send his wife to a lunatic asylum, by which means, in consideration of a modest boarding-fee, he would be rid of the annoyance and the sad spectacle that the presence of a madwoman in his house occasioned. Ludwig became indignant at this suggestion, and persisted in caring for the insane woman with the tenderness and devotion that she had shown him when she had enjoyed her reason. There was no more studying for the scientist; he lavished his intelligence, his time, his days and nights, in humoring the bizarre caprices of the maniac. People ended up believing that he was going mad himself.
Nothing discouraged Ludwig for five years; nothing diminished his devotion to Ebba. At the end of that time, he fell victim to a further misfortune. The merchant in Pallmailstrasse, with whom he had invested the capital that yielded an income of eight hundred livres, went bankrupt and fled. That event left Klopstock with no other resource than the meager returns of his farm in Oltenzen. That would still have been sufficient for the scientist, who would not have minded being subject to privations, but the privations in question would affect poor Ebba. He decided to apply for a chair in astronomy that had just fallen vacant at the College of Altona.
Imagine what anguish, annoyance and distaste a poor timid man who never went out, and who only maintained rare and distant relationships with two or three friends, must have experienced when he had to solicit employment, explain his request to the burgomeister and submit to the disdain of the councilors. No one took his request seriously, and a professor was summoned from Drontheim. When Ludwig learned that, he sold his little house in Altona and set out for his farm in Oltenzen, taking nothing with him by his scientific instruments and his telescope. Ebba followed him mechanically, without knowing what she was doing. Her soul, as you know, was in Heaven, with her child.
Ludwig’s farm was near Oltenzen church. From the window, he could see his uncle’s tomb, shaded by a linden tree that the great poet had once planted. Ludwig sent his tenant farmer away and set about cultivating the land, with more intelligence, and even more strength, than anyone could have expected of him. The peasants began by laughing at his experiments and innovations, but they ended up copying him. The time that Klopstock did not spend harrowing and laboring, he devoted to study. The telescope took possession of the roof of Ludwig’s farm; he hardly slept—for sleep is like friendship; it only lavishes its favors on the fortunate—and spent his nights studying the stars. During these vigils, consecrated to the admiration of celestial marvels, Ebba lay her head on the scientist’s knees and descended into a dreamless torpor that resembled death.
One morning, on descending from his observatory, Ludwig, who was ordinarily sad and absent-minded, manifested an unusual and heedless joy. The scientist’s manifestations of happiness could not have been more energetic if Ebba had recovered her reason. He spent six nights writing a long letter, with which he was never satisfied; he began it over, annotated it, consulted his telescope again...
Finally, the important work complete, he placed his memoir carefully in an envelope and posted it in Altona, after taking the precaution of franking it and obtaining a receipt from the Post Office. The package was addressed to the director of Hamburg Observatory, and contained the discovery of the axial rotation of Saturn in ten hours thirty-two minutes.
This is the reply he received:
If your letter is not a hoax, Monsieur, you are a little too late to claim a discovery made and published a fortnight ago by Frederick William Herschel.25
In response to this cruel disappointment, which stole all the glory of which he had dreamed for his name, Ludwig only manifested his chagrin by his habitual sad smile.
Let us admit, however, that in the meantime, that obscure and timid man had been devoured by a thirst for celebrity. He dreamed night and day of making a name for himself. He sensed a mysterious force within himself that elevated him above vulgarity and only required to manifest itself to be resplendent forever. Poverty and misfortune, however, rendered
that manifestation impossible.
When, two years later, he announced that it was possible to solidify carbon dioxide, no one even wanted to read his memoir, nor examine the diagrams he had attached thereto for the construction of the machine necessary to carry out the experiment. The Hamburg Academy remembered the belated discovery of the rotation of Saturn, and treated as fantasy the great operation that was to be reinvented a few years later, by our illustrious scientist Monsieur Thilorier.26
Several years went by without Ludwig leaving the village of Oltenzen or making any further attempts to publish the results of his studies.
One day, when the aeronaut Bitorff,27 in the midst of an immense crowd of spectators, was getting ready to depart from Hamburg and make an aerial voyage, he saw a little man in a large threadbare black coat coming towards him. Without any preamble, the man proposed that he should accompany him on the excursion that he was about to make by balloon. At first, Bitorff thought that he was dealing with a madman, but as the unknown man insisted and even offered the aeronaut several handfuls of gold to obtain what he desired, he ended up giving his consent, all the more willingly because the strangeness of the proposition and the discussion keenly excited the general curiosity. Like a good speculator wanting a double return, however, he told Ludwig that his ascent would only take place two weeks hence, because the balloon—he alleged—was not yet powerful enough to carry two travelers. Ludwig consented to this delay, and calmly went back to Oltenzen, from which he returned on the appointed day.
During the two weeks, Ludwig Klopstock’s project had been the only topic of conversation in Hamburg. The old story of the axial rotation of Saturn, discovered a month after Herschel’s publication, was exhumed, and a thousand jokes were told. Bitorff had never attracted as many spectators as he did on the day when the ascension of his travelling companion was to take place. Ludwig, intimidated by the crowd, the eyes of which were fixed on him, approached the gondola awkwardly and almost tore the balloon by bumping into the scientific instruments with which it as laden, in order to carry out experiments during the voyage. To his great regret, the aeronaut obliged him to leave part of his luggage on the ground. They both took their places, the ropes were released and the balloon rose up rapidly like a bird.
Ludwig’s first sensation, when he felt himself borne away by the frail machine, was terror. The immense abyss gaping beneath his feet furrowed the scientist’s brow and surrounded him with swirling dizziness. Each commotion was succeeded by a sort of perfidious satisfaction. He leaned over the earth, attracted by a mysterious force, and was about to launch himself forth when his companion seized his arm and held him back. Once extracted from this peril, Ludwig recovered all his composure, armed himself with resolution and set about looking down with a freedom of spirit by which the aeronaut could only be astonished.
There is no way to describe the sensations that the scientist experienced. As they drew further away from the earth, one might have thought that his soul separated itself, disengaging itself from its original clay and freeing itself from the bonds of his body. An indescribable well-being penetrated every part of him; a gentle warmth enlivened him; his mind worked powerfully; he forgot all his misery, all his suffering, all his mundane humiliations. He was finally himself!
Around him sparkled a kind of light that resembled an opaline gleam. Above his head extended the immensity of the azure of the heavens. Beneath his feet the earth was retreating and the horizon slowly became more distinct. The rivers presented all their sinuosities simultaneously; the houses and villas seemed to spring from the bosom of the earth; the sea extended in the distance like a vast sheet of silk, stirred by the wind; the fields displayed their golden escutcheons, quartered in green and purple; the forests covered vast expanses with their somber mantle; people were no more than little dots moving hither and yon, vain and imperceptible dust! Then again, there was no sound and no movement around the aerial voyagers. A profound, absolute silence! Not the bleak and somber silence of human solitudes but a silence that was, so to speak, melodious. It seemed to them that the distant harmonies of the celestial worlds were about to reach their terrestrial ears.
While Ludwig concentrated on these new and sublime impressions, Bitorff, to whom they were familiar, managed the aerostat and devoted himself to various experiments whose program he had organized with his companion before leaving the earth. When his calculations informed him that they were at an altitude of six hundred meters, he told Ludwig; the latter shivered, for the aeronaut’s voice burst forth with supernatural force, and had nothing human about it. Meanwhile, the atmosphere was beginning to get chilly. The ineffable wellbeing that Klopstock had experienced was succeeded by a period of icy cold. Bitorff’s voice lost its marvelous vibration. A hum began to deafen their ears. They were at twelve hundred meters.
Ten minutes later, Ludwig thought he could make out an almost-unintelligible murmur. He tried to ask Bitorff whether it might originate from speech addressed to him. To his great surprise, he could not hear his own voice at all, and he had to make great efforts that wearied his lungs and throat to proffer his question.
“We’re two thousand meters above the earth,” Bitorff finally managed to make him understand. “The expansion of the hydrogen gas contained in the balloon, which has been increasing since we left the ground, has now reached such an extent that I’m obliged to open the valve. Otherwise, the envelope of our vehicle would burst under the strain.”
Meanwhile, a thick veil, similar to one of the heavy mists that sometimes expand over the earth during a thaw, obscuring darkening entire cities with their noxious shroud, spread over the earth and ended up concealing everything from the voyagers’ eyes. Soon, dull roaring sounds rumbled in the distance below the balloon. Terrible noises burst forth. Broad lighting-flashes hurled their fiery wings through the chaos. Flamboyant serpents of lightning launched forth in all directions. There was something terrifying about that revolution of the elements, seen and heard by two men who were only sustained in mid-air by a frail piece of taffeta inflated by a little hydrogen. Bitorff felt fear grip his heart, but Ludwig experienced a sort of savage joy. He laughed strangely; he clapped his hands; he jumped up and down. One might have thought him the spirit of tempests, in the midst of his accursed triumph.
The balloon was still rising, by virtue of a regular movement completely imperceptible to those it as lifting. The storm ended up by no longer being anything more than a mute black dot beneath their feet. That dot gradually dissipated and disappeared. The earth showed itself again, but confused. One could still distinguish, with great attention, roads like black threads and rivers like tresses of silver and gold. Above the aeronauts, the sky was resplendent with a serenity of which the earthbound can have no inkling, even on the highest mountains. Its azure took on a deep blue tint, which declined towards the lower regions into a greenish hue.
“Four thousand meters!” shouted Bitorff’s voice, beginning to recover its strength, to his companion, who was numbed by a violent cold.
That voice burst forth in deafening vibrations a quarter of an hour later, when it announced: “Six thousand meters!”
Nothing was any longer visible on the earth but large masses. Bitorff threw into the air two birds that he had brought on the balloon. The poor creatures extended their wings to take flight, but they fell like leaden masses; their air, too rarefied, could no longer lend them support. Ludwig’s respiration became more difficult; his chest was oppressed, chilled by the cold—and yet he felt excited by a feverish agitation. His heart was beating rapidly, his breathing accelerated. Two birds and a rabbit that still remained in the gondola began to choke, and were not long in dying for lack of viable air.
“Eight thousand meters,” said Bitorff.28
His voice had become dull again, and with a gesture he showed Ludwig that nothing any longer remained beneath their feet. The earth and the clouds had disappeared; the immensity of space surrounded the balloon in every direction. As for the cold,
it was intolerable. Their shallow breath was scarcely sufficient for the conservation of animal warmth. Blood leaked from the eyes, nostrils and ears of the audacious duo; their words were inaudible. The balloon, the only object they could see, seemed about to expire, so impetuously was the hydrogen gas escaping. Beneath them, the blue of the sky; above, strange and unknown darkness, through which the stars projected a light deprived of scintillation, which had something funereal about it. There ended physical nature. There were located the impenetrable barriers imposed by God on human audacity.
The gas condensed, and the balloon ceased climbing.
“Master,” said Bitorff to Klopstock, “if we don’t want to die, let’s make haste to descend to earth! You can see it: the divine hand has written in terrible letters: ‘Thou shalt go no further.’ But what are you doing? Have you lost your mind? What! You’re throwing out our ballast! You’re taking off your clothes!”
“Because I want to go further!” cried Ludwig, enthusiastically. “Yes, I want to cross the barriers imposed on humankind. Look! The balloon, free of all ballast, is still rising; let’s break the gondola, hang on to the cords and reach the heavens!”
He began to put this plan into operation. Bitorff launched himself toward the valve and opened it, in spite of the despairing efforts of his companion. The balloon descended; the air gradually became less cold as they arrived in less elevated atmospheric layers. The earth reappeared beneath them, initially as an indistinct gray mass; then it gradually took on a more precise form. Its rivers and roads became visible, details reappeared, people and animals increased in size…and the balloon finally touched down about two leagues from Hamburg.
Bitorff exploded in transports of joy.
Ludwig Klopstock wept with rage and disappointment. “We could have gone into the darkness of infinity!” he repeated to his companion.
Martyrs of Science Page 14