So he went forth, followed by ten young men whose skill and strength were proof against anything. His face reddened with joy and his heart beat with emotion when he suddenly found himself face to face with a lion, when his arrow struck it full in the chest and when the monster collapsed on the sand in the throes of death. It was not long before a wild boar and an aurochs were subjected to the same fate. After that last victory, and as the sun had already traveled more than half of its course, the young warriors, on the order given to them by the happy hunter, loaded the three dead monsters on to the shafts of their spears, enlaced so as to make stretchers. To shorten their return journey, they headed toward the island through a part of the forest that they had not explored thus far, but which seemed bound to take them more directly to the bank of the Seine.
Suddenly, two enormous dogs barred their way and were getting ready to charge them when a voice ordered them to stop; they obeyed, quivering with rage, and without recoiling before the weapons that the hunters had hastily brought to bear.
At the same time, a young woman appeared, standing on a rock, holding a child in her arms.
“Sacred Chief,” she said, addressing the old man, “swear to me in the name of the Sun that you will spare this child and not make him a slave, and I will bring to your tribe secrets of happiness and power that it does not have. I can teach you to tame wild oxen, the females of which give an abundance of delicious milk; I can teach you to make a dog into a friend, a defender and a vigilant guardian of your herds; I can inform you as to herb that alleviate the pain of wounds and balms that cure them. The daughter of a tribal chief, a prisoner of those you vanquished, I have been roaming this forest since their defeat, fighting wild animals for my son, thanks to these two faithful animals. If you heed my prayer, I will become your servant; if you refuse, I shall hurl myself and my son from the top of this rock, for I would rather he were dead than a slave.”
The old man replied: “You are not of the race of our enemies, so we cannot treat you as an enemy. Come! Henceforth , you are my daughter, and your child is my son.”
At these words, the young woman came down from the rock and prostrated herself before the chief, who brought her to her feet and took the child in his arms,
The little troop then headed silently for the island; the dogs followed, walking at their mistress’ heels and keeping their intelligent eyes fixed upon her.
When they came close to the bank the old man invited the young woman and her child to take their places beside him in the bark canoe that took them to the Cité. On his order, the young men accompanying him sounded a kind of primitive fanfare with the horns they were carrying at their waists. The entire tribe—men, women and children—immediately assembled.
“This is my daughter and this is my son,” said the old man, with a solemn simplicity. Take them to my dwelling.”
People hastened to obey the order, but before accompanying her new companion, the young woman extracted a shrill sound from a bone whistle attached to her waist. At that appeal, the two dogs launched themselves into the water from the bank where they had remained, and ran to heir mistress, to the great astonishment and near alarm of the spectators.
She showed the chief to the dogs and placed the old man’s hands on their heads.
“This is your master,” she told them.
The two hounds, which were reminiscent of the strong race of Pyrenean dogs, licked the old man’s hands and raised their eyes to look at his as if to ask for his orders. He gave them a sign to follow their mistress; they accompanied her to the threshold of the cabin to which she was conducted, and lay down there like vigilant and faithful guardians.
Twenty years later, the increase in the population of the Cité had obliged the tribe to take possession of the two neighboring islands, and even to establish colonies on the banks of the Seine.
Every day, the men separated into two bands, pastors and hunters; the former led to pasture the immense herds of cattle that furnished milk in abundance every morning and evening to the women, who had been taught the art of milking by the chief’s adoptive daughter. Other flocks, comprised of sheep, added to the tribe’s wellbeing; an abundance reigned therein, the possibility of which they had never suspected when they first settled on the banks of the Seine.
Thanks to the woman to whom they owed so much wealth, they now knew how to cultivate several plants, which furnished them with aliments or contributed to curing diseases. With hops and elderberries they concocted a beverage that was both bitter and tonic, which, after fermentation, acquired the property of rendering strength to hunters wearied by long excursions. Hazel-trees grew everywhere; cabbages acquired a more succulent flesh in carefully-dug ground; bedstraw served to transform milk into solid nutriment; even wheat was beginning to cover fields labored with a flint ploughshare and a plough formed of naturally-curved tree-trunks. Finally, everyone had a dog—which is to say, a friend and devoted servant.
Thus, the tribe became so powerful that no enemy any longer dared think of attacking it, and when the old chief died and had been buried under the dolmen, the child of his adopted daughter was elected to replace him.
She was regarded as a kind of divinity, for she revealed and taught the virtues of plants on a daily basis. The marsh mallow served her to calm the coughs that the dampness of the neighborhood and the north winds caused the majority of children to suffer, the dried roots of the arum to procure invalids a light aliment, and St. John’s wort to make a balm to cure bruises and scar wounds.
She also informed her companions of the way to give meats a perfumed savor by associating the odorous stems of thyme and hyssop with their cooking.
Her son, docile to her advice, showed himself to be as intelligent as he was courageous; he fortified the islands and made them safe from any invasion; he equipped a flotilla of boats that permitted excursions to be undertaken to any part of the country through which the river flowed; he even attempted to tame wild horses, and succeeded in taking them prisoner with the aid of a lasso and then dominating them by audacity and energy, as is done today on the American pampas.
Such is the probable story of the first inhabitants of Paris, fantasy playing much less part in the story you have just read than you might think.
For want of any other merit, I have consciously reproduced the physiognomy of the Stone Age in France, in accordance with the archeological works and publications of Édouard Lartet, Henry Christy, Constant Troyon, Ferdinand Keller, Johann Uhlmann, Otto Jahn, Colonel Friedrich Schwab, François Alphonse Forel, Maximilien Rey, Édouard Desor and Adolphe Pictet. I have seen and studied the majority of flint and bone weapons and implements of the Stone Age, in the collections of Messieurs Lartet and Christy, and in my own collection.
THE YEAR 2865
I left Dr. Evrard and returned to the Chaussée-d’Antin as midnight was chiming. I was exhausted by fatigue, so I did not take long to go to sleep as I mentally reviewed all that my old friend had told me, revisiting in dreams the epochs that he had evoked.
The next morning, my head a trifle heavy, I tried to get down to work.
Sometimes, when one is sitting at one’s desk and one takes up the pen, Phoebus is deaf and Pegasus mulish, as Boileau puts it. In other, less poetic and less classical terms, some days, in spite of the perseverance one puts into it, one cannot find the opening words of the idea one wants to express. Those first words resemble the end of a confused and tangled thread that one wants to unravel. Once the end of the thread is discovered and seized, everything will wrong and the Gordian knots of the tangle will come undone easily—but the difficulty is getting a grip on it.
The physiologists, who are not always as fortunate in their explanations, suggest that the reason for that contest between the will and the idea is a lack of equilibrium between the imagination and the body. The former desires but the latter, which is not enslaved to it, jibs; “the husband orders, the wife resists,” as Balzac says. It is necessary, therefore, to bring them into accord,
to the same rhythm.
The best thing to do, in that circumstance, is to leave the desk, the pen, the ink and the paper and to devoted oneself to a completely different occupation. Some writers, including Casimir Delavigne, take their hat and go for a walk; others—Balzac, for example—wear out the soles of their slippers of the parquet of their study. Ampère played with his wig; Ludovic Halévy, that golden heart, taking generosity to the extent of weakness, sought to pick a German quarrel with those around him, especially his two sisters, in which he was not long delayed in being the first to laugh, as soon as he sensed enough movement in his nerves to write his beautiful pages of music. Walter Scott took up a hammer and nails and set the hands that had written The Antiquary and Ivanhoe to rearranging the trophies that ornamented his study.
As for me, if I dare to place my name humbly in the wake of so many illustrious ones, I have recourse to the example of the Scottish romancer; when I cannot find the diabolical end of the thread that I mentioned just now. I take off my jacket, I rearrange my books, I modify the disposition of my collections, and I tidy or untidy the cupboards that contain them.
Now, that is precisely what happened to me on the day after my visit to Dr. Evrard. With my head still full of all that he had told and read to me, I could not contrive to write those crucial first lines that I have just been talking about.
After having scribbled and torn up a dozen pages, therefore, I brought a ladder, climbed up on to the top step and started exploring and charging the position of some bottles, which, forgotten and covered in dust, had been placidly sat on top of a large Flemish dresser for years.
While I looked at those glass vessels and picked them up, trying to decipher the dusty and partly-effaced characters of their labels, the ineptly-closed door of my study came open, my little dog Flock starting barked with all his might and Mademoiselle Mine, my charming quadrumane from Madagascar, leapt on to my shoulder with a single bound. That sudden noise and the unexpected shock caused me to drop the bottle that I was holding. It fell to the floor, smashed, and a strong smell of sulfuric ether expanded to fill the room.
Immediately, a kind of vertigo took possession of me, and I only just had time to climb down the ladder and open the two windows precipitately, for the sake of the causes of the accident; my little dog, Master Flock, was already panting, and Mademoiselle Mine’s large golden eyes were beginning to take to on an expression of languor, while her little hands, ordinarily so agile and nervous, were falling inert upon the thick fur of her flanks.
As you know, ether, which has such powerful anesthetic properties, evaporates quickly. Soon, however—at least, I thought so—thanks to a vigorous current of air established between the doors and the windows, no other traces of the accident remained but a large damp stain on the carpet. I picked up the glass debris scattered here and there, and reclosed the windows, while Mademoiselle Mine engaged Flock in an animated game of tag. As the emotions provoked by the accident, by strongly exciting my nerves, had doubtless restored my mental and physical equilibrium sufficiently for me to work, I sat down at my desk again, and, supporting my forehead in my left hand, I took up my pen in the right and dipped it in the ink.
I sensed that inspiration had finally deigned to arrive, and I was about to write the first words of my piece when majestic songs became audible outside and captured the attention of my ears. Voices of a character previously unknown to me, of a immense power and a sweetness that seemed prodigious, combined with a melodious accompaniment of brass instruments similar, so far as I could judge, to those that my friend Sax has invented.88
The voices were singing distinctly, without a syllable being lost, the words of the Gospel that the church has introduced into the All Saints’ Day mass: Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis et orenati estis; et ego reficiam vos. Amen. Come to me, you who labor and are burdened, and I will comfort you. Praise God.
Then, suddenly, that song of hope was succeeded by a funereal song: Absolve, Domine, animas omnium fidelim defunctorum ab omni vinculo delictorum. Lord, deign to absolve the souls of the dead and deliver them from the bonds of their sins.
“What does all this mean?” I wondered.
Suddenly, my door opened and a person I did not know came in, who sat down unceremoniously in an armchair near the fireplace.
Now, without my being able to explain it, that fireplace was no longer in the location it had previously occupied against the wall; it was in the middle of the room and had become a sort of item of furniture of extreme elegance, which was burning a gas of extreme purity.
I said that I did not know the person who had come into my study abruptly and was nonchalantly warming her feet, and yet it seemed to me that a close amity linked me to the young man in question, for I instinctively addressed him as “tu.”
“What do you think, Azrael?” I asked him. “Isn’t that beautiful music?”
“Yes,” he replied, “you’re right. The steam organs on the picturesque thousand-meter tower at the highest point of Montmartre are doing their work very well today. The words of the songs are emerging clearly against the accompaniment, which makes the stand out. But bah! That’s only the infancy of the art.”
“The infancy of the art, you say? Organs that sing, pronouncing words that can be heard distinctly all over Paris!”
Azrael looked at me, smiling. “One might think you were a thousand years behind the times and contemporary with Adolphe Sax, the first man to conceive and formulate the idea of those gigantic instruments. Thank God that his great-grandson continued and perfected his work so singularly. But what were you doing yesterday? I didn’t see you all day. Myself, I went to the Hôtel-Dieu on the heights of Romainville to see an operation on a poor boy in whom I have an interest, and who broke his leg during a hunting-party in Berlin in the morning.”
“He was in Berlin yesterday morning and had an operation in Paris yesterday evening?”
“The atmospheric highway was working poorly again—we took six hours instead of five to cover that short distance. It seems that the condensed carbon dioxide that powers the machine had suffered some evaporation. It’s unpardonable! We manipulate that material easily today, so redoubtable for our ancestors that it killed a considerable number of the first people who attempted to apply it to the needs of locomotion and industry.”
“And how is your invalid?”
“Everything went well. With the aid of the electricity that burns and cuts at the same time, the wound was opened, the splinters of broken bone removed and the periosteum—the delicate membrane enveloping the bones, which reproduces and regenerates them—conserved. It will take the patient a month at the most, to regain complete possession of his broken leg. Anyway, being ill is an inviting prospect, in order to stay in the new Hôtel-Dieu, two minutes from the center of Paris by aerial highway, with eight hundred private rooms. Every patient there is isolated, unable to hear the groans of his companions in distress, with no fear of the deadly miasmas of epidemic diseases, cared for by a Sister of Charity and visited eight or ten times a day by eminent surgeons.”
“The operation must have been long and painful.”
“What are you saying? Don’t you know that chloroform, which can be obtained with irreproachable purity, has caused suffering to disappear from the surface of the globe? They boy I’m talking about had scarcely received his wound when I chloroformized him. I maintained him under anesthesia throughout the journey and only allowed him to wake up after the operation had been successfully concluded. At the slightest access of fever the same means will be used, and he will, so to speak, have been injured, operated on and healed without being conscious of it. But aren’t you going out? There’s an odor of ether in here that’s suffocating.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s go out.”
I summoned my valet and asked him to bring my hat. He brought me a light, elegant and comfortable article that had nothing in common with the frightful stove-pipes with which fashion obliges us to cover our heads.
I went to a mirror to see how the coiffure in question suited me; it harmonized perfectly with the clothes I was wearing, which bore no more resemblance to my customary frock-cost and trousers than my headgear did to my silk hat.
“Just a moment!” the young man said. “Before going out I have to send word to Berlin to reassure the injured boy’s friends.”
Azrael sat down at my desk and wrote a few lines on a small apparatus placed beside my writing-pad. Two seconds later, a note appeared on the apparatus in handwriting that was a trifle hasty but whose characters were clear and distinct.
The note said:
Thanks for the good news you’ve given us. We’ll go to dinner with you soon. Be at the Café Carême-Dugléré89 at six precisely. It’s the only one where the healthy traditions of the two creators of French cuisine are still maintained.
Berlin, 1 November 2865. 12.01 p.m.
I confess that I was confused.
“Which way shall we go? What if we go to see the Artillery Museum at Vincennes? I’d like to visit those monuments to a barbarity that has disappeared forever from the globe. How can one imagine nowadays that war ever existed, and that the reasoning of might, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of men, decided the destiny of nations? Thank God that the means of destroying armies, fleets and cities became so infallible that it was necessary to renounce them. The electric machine that blew up the entire city of Kronstadt in 2859, and all its fortifications, instantaneously, was the last and ultimate effort of military science. Since then, permanent peace has reigned in Europe It’s necessary to admit that our ancestors were great barbarians. Come on, let’s go to Vincennes.”
Martyrs of Science Page 38