Martyrs of Science

by S. Henry Berthoud

“I’ll ask Jean to bring round a carriage.”

  “Why not a fiacre hitched to a horse—if there were still horses? We’ll take a locomobile via the atmospheric highway. We’ll be disembarking at Saint Louis’ old château in ten seconds.”

  He opened the door and escorted me into a cabinet that had replaced the stair-head. A machine moving smoothly and almost insensibly took us from the fourth floor to the ground floor.

  “And to think that a thousand years ago,” my companion observed, “people preferred living on the first floor, where they lacked air and a view, to the fourth, where one enjoys those precious advantages. It’s true that the architects of that era didn’t understand that one could go up to one’s residence by other means than that of a staircase. I saw one of those primitive machines the other day, at the Musée de Cluny. Can you imagine that one had to climb a hundred narrow and slippery steps, which also formed a kind of spiral rotating about an axis, capable of giving vertigo to the most solid head.

  A harmonious bell, which struck a perfect musical chord, informed us that we had reached the ground. We opened a door and found ourselves in the street. Sidewalks garnished with paving stones of various colors, forming exquisite mosaics, bordered a street planted with trees, wider than the widest boulevards of the present day. The causeway no longer consisted of macadam or cobblestones, but of a kind of parquet, whose cleanliness was worthy of a Dutch housewife, on which the foot, far from slipping, posed securely.

  My mysterious friend made a gesture, and an elegant vehicle immediately emerged from a garage and moved toward us with lightning rapidity. I stepped back immediately in order not to be crushed, but it came to an abrupt halt fifty centimeters away from me, without any hesitation or the slightest oscillation. Not daring to give evidence of my surprise, I took my place beside me friend on a comfortable and elastic seat, and a young mechanic with an intelligent face placed himself behind us.

  “Where can I take you, Messieurs?” he asked.

  “To Vincennes,” I replied.

  He touched a switch lightly, and we drew away. The vehicle moved so rapidly that I could hardly see the road along which we were traveling. By paying close attention, however, I was able to make out thousands of vehicles similar to ours, speeding in every direction along immense roads bordered by houses reminiscent of palaces.

  “Aren’t you afraid of some accident?” I said

  “What accident? Are accidents possible? Can’t you see the mastery the mechanics have of their locomobiles? The pedestrians walk on the sidewalks or cross the road with the aid of all these footbridges, which carry them up and across without them having the trouble of walking, by means of a kind of endless ribbon, always moving. One might think that you were seeing all this for the first time.”

  “We’ve arrived, Messieurs,” the mechanic put in.

  My friend gave him a gold coin and we got down.

  I confess that the price of the journey seemed high, but I dared not make that reflection for fear of exposing myself once again to the mockery of the man who had already been so amused by my astonishment. Internally, however, I thought: My God! Has the value of gold been so depreciated that one has to pay twenty francs for a cab-ride lasting a few seconds?

  “Let’s go in,” said my friend, linking arms with me.

  The Château de Vincennes stood in the middle of an immense park in which exotic plants of every species were growing in the open air, among which, in the midst of a vigorously-growing field of sugar-cane I noticed in passing flowers of the most distant and various provenance, and the hottest climates.

  On the bank of a stream Azrael picked a pitcher-plant of the species Nepenthes rafflesiana, discovered in 1828 in Singapore by Stamford Raffles, the urn of which contained exquisitely flavored fresh water. I imitated Azrael, detaching two similar flowers from their stems in order to study at leisure the urn, the male flower and the fruit.

  Among these fields, so new to me, animals from all over the world were wandering, in a more-or-less wild natural state, for Vincennes had replaced the Natural History Museum, the Botanical Gardens and the Artillery Museum at the same time. Tigers, lions, panthers and jaguars were no longer pacing sadly back and forth in cages eight or ten feet square, and no longer eating spoiled meat declared unfit for human consumption but judged by scientists to be good enough for animals used to nourishing themselves at liberty on live prey. They were in vast enclosures surrounded by railings, it’s true, but which were so well adapted to their habits that they ended up forgetting their captivity. One therefore encountered them in all their beauty and all their instincts.

  As for the fortress itself, which loomed up behind the arbors of the menagerie and the fields of sugar cane, an immense roof of glass covered its completely, like a precious jewel of the architecture of the 13th century, in order to shelter it from the insults of the weather, and also to adapt it to its present purpose.

  In fact, Vincennes was no longer either a royal residence, a fortified military station or a state prison, but an immense museum in which all the instruments of the past centuries were collected—instruments that had become useless by virtue of their terrible perfection and fatal infallibility.

  When we went into the principal hall, showed around by an old man who seemed to me to be almost a centenarian, I expected to see cannons, rifles and sabers, but I only perceive gigantic electric machines; at first glance they resembled Ruhmkorff coils, and were based on the principle of that apparatus, but modified by the improvements that ten centuries of progress had naturally given them.

  “Monsieur,” said the director of the Museum, showing me a coil the size of a house, “this is the last word in the art of war. I operated this machine myself in my youth, for I was one of the last soldiers to fight in Europe. This machine produced, in a single second, twenty-four thousand electrical sparks four hundred meters long and two hundred broad. A single one of those sparks was sufficient to destroy an army and blast a town, as it proved only too well by razing Kronstadt in twenty-two seconds. That siege, which would have seemed utterly fantastic in 1865, ten centuries earlier, was, however, accused of dragging on too long. Indeed, as you know, in America, previously, where the civil war over the separation of the southern states was still going on, two armies had destroyed one another mutually in six seconds. Of the eight hundred thousand combatants present, only eight hundred escaped the electric thunderbolts, thanks to a lightning-conductor invented by the great-grandson of a French scientist of the 19th century, Auguste Bertsch, who left behind a justly-celebrated name.”90

  “Azrael and I,” I said to the old man, would like to visit the part of your collection devoted to firearms, the usage of which preceded that of electric weapons.”

  “Since those childish machines interest you,” the old man replied, obligingly, “would you care to accompany me to that part of my museum.”

  As he said that, he opened a door and introduced us into an immense gallery in which picturesque trophies were disposed, not only of ten-shot rifles similar to our revolvers, but also of cannons of every form and dimensions. I noticed, among others, a bomb a thousand meters in diameter, filled with gun-cotton and other fulminating materials, long since substituted for powder. One seemingly-frail machine could launch that bomb four thousand meters, which burst at an altitude of a kilometer and whose debris was sufficient to ravage an entire city the size of Paris.

  “Haven’t you had enough of these barbaric and brutal engines of destruction?” said Azrael. “Let’s leave all these implements of the infancy of the art of killing people behind.”

  We took our leave of the director of the Vincennes museum and headed toward an immense hall illuminated by the full force of the midday sun. We found a professor there, still young, who was entertaining is pupils with the marvels of the microscopic world that remained so long invisible to the human eye.

  “Would you believe, Messieurs,” he said, “that until the middle of the 20th century, science did not possess either
the means of weighing, or even of seeing, the emanations that bodies produce? Yes, the odor of a rose struck the sense of smell, the bitter perfumes of camphor gave people headaches, and mortal miasmas, carried from distant regions by the wind, caused epidemics, but chemistry, to which they had exclusive recourse for analysis, showed nothing and indicated nothing. The arrival of the microscope finally changed all that, bringing an end to so much ignorance and setting people on the path to the truth and demonstration.

  “Here, for instance, is a morsel of musk, over which I place this objective, which magnifies the surface of objects forty million times. See what a series of jets of vegetable matter are escaping the camphor! See how they’re dispersing! See how the spikes with which they’re bristling cling on to the nervous papillae in the nose, titillating them energetically and penetrating all the way to the brain, where they determine slight congestions. Although also vegetal, the molecules of these violet flowers are of a completely different nature: supple, covered with a kind of oil, they insinuate themselves and slide into the olfactory apparatus to produce an agreeable sensation there. Well, our ancestors hadn’t the slightest notion of all that!”

  Then he showed, magnified twenty-five million times, the infusoria of the air and water, with their eggs, their three or four metamorphoses, and their strange ways of life. After that, he caused the mysterious products of the decomposition of organic bodies to appear, which once brought cholera from India to Europe. He similarly displayed those that produce epidemics of typhoid fever, puerperal fever and erysipelas in hospitals, and s many other maladies that could not be cured, prevented or stopped from spreading in the 19th century. Today, carbolic acid, spread by exhalations in the air whenever those miasmas appear, destroys them in a matter of minutes.”

  “All this is undoubtedly not lacking in a certain interest,” Azrael murmured in my ear, “but as no one except a schoolboy of sixteen is unaware of these elementary notions, which I studied in my youth and doubtless you did too, let’s not waste our time and let’s continue our walk.”

  A false shame caused me to follow Azrael—much to my regret, I confess, for the professor had just announced to his pupils a series of experiments on the Entomozoaria, the strange worms that once infected meat destined for human nourishment, resistant to cooking in boiling water and poisoning with their living germs those who had recourse without precaution to such deadly aliments.91

  We went outside, therefore, and before long we found ourselves on one of the immense sidewalks that bordered the vast boulevards forming the most minor of Parisian streets. In the midst of an innumerable crowd, every step offered women of remarkable beauty to my gaze, who did justice to costumes that were simultaneously elegant and charming in their simplicity. Needless to say, the crinoline and the iron-hooped skirt were not featured at all in their styles.

  “Oh, look!” I exclaimed, pointing one of them out to Azrael. “What an adorable creature! What a shame not to be able to keep an image of that beautiful individual as souvenir!”

  “In truth,” Azrael replied, “there are moments when you remind me of one of those émigrés of ten centuries ago, of whom it was said that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Are you from the year 1865 rather than 2865? Don’t you have your photographic apparatus in your pocket, as I do?”

  So saying, he took a little box of a particular form out of his waistcoat pocket, directed it toward the lovely woman who had excited my admiration and moved one of its levers. Then he moved a second lever and deposited a portrait in a hand, of such finesse and exactitude that only the most charming miniatures of Isabey and Madame Oberlin92 can give any idea of it. Resemblance, delicacy of tone, accuracy of hue, living expression—nothing was lacking.

  I was careful not to let my surprise show, and silently placed the improvised painting in my wallet.

  “I believe,” Azrael said, sniggering, “that we have resolved the problem that Niépce de Saint-Victor was pursuing in 1864.93 But bah! It’s nothing, after all, but an insignificant plaything. Everyone has one and it only costs forty francs—the price of a good cigar.”

  As he finished that sentence he presented his case to me and offered me one of the forty-franc cigars in question, which, I must admit, appeared to me to be very fine. I needed to remind myself, nevertheless, that gold must have lost its value, in order that I should not find puffs of tobacco that cost five francs apiece a trifle dear.

  While I abandoned myself to these reflections, I noticed that immense umbrellas were being extended over the streets everywhere, moved by a mechanism that was both ingenious and simple, and that they had been substituted for the light and brightly-colored parasols that had once moderated the sun’s excessively warm rays.

  “That’s right!” said Azrael. “I’d forgotten that, three days ago, the meteorologists charged by the State for monitoring the direction of the winds had forecast rain for today at four twenty-two and thirty seconds. I get angry when I think that our ancestors, in their ignorance, left their fields of wheat, their vineyards and even their gardens exposed without defense to the caprices of wind, frost, hail and the fury of the winds. Should they not have had meteorology at their disposal, as we do, to anticipate ill-timed downpours, and electricity, with the aid of which all those sinister phenomena have been mastered and vanquished forever?”

  We continued our stroll through Paris, and I cannot describe all the dazzling sights that I experienced at every step. Everything seemed new to me, and I was watching dusk fall with disappointment when suddenly, with lightning rapidity, more quickly than I can say, the entirety of Paris was illuminated.

  “What! Why are you trembling?” Azrael asked me. “Aren’t you accustomed to seeing the fifty million gas jets that illuminate Paris light up simultaneously every evening, with the aid of a powerful electrical apparatus? Nothing is simpler, and it goes back to the remotest antiquity—1862 or 1865. A thin platinum wire that terminates at each gas jet conducts an electric spark produced by a Ruhmkorff coil to it. Our ancestors four generations ago went to admire the phenomenon, as they called it, at the Sorbonne, and even in shops selling silk clothing on the boulevards. That, at least, is what it says in the Petites Chroniques de la Science, by a certain S. Henry Berthoud, written a thousand years ago, which I found the other day, by the remotest of chances, in a corner of the Imperial Library.94

  Chatting in that fashion, we were heading, as best I could judge toward the Champ de Mars. It did not take me long to hear the sound of waves, and I saw emerging before me mot merely a harbor full of ships, but an immense sea on the horizon. Azrael, without noticing my amazement, signaled to a small launch powered by condensed carbon dioxide to come and pick us up and take us aboard a ship that was getting ready to leave for China.

  “My friend,” he said to the captain when we had boarded the vessel, a thousand meters long and proportionately wide, “I have some small business matters to attend to in Paris that prevent me from accompanying you to Peking. I therefore request that you be kind enough o bring me back—alive, of course—eight or ten unicornfish, and a hundred fresh swifts’-nests. I’ve only been able to get ones of mediocre quality in Paris for some time. I intend those I’m requesting of your courtesy for a dinner-party I’m giving for a few friends in a fortnight, and I hope you won’t refuse my invitation to join us that evening.”

  “Gladly,” said the captain. “Do you need anything else?”

  “I don’t want to abuse your kindness—otherwise I’d ask you to administer a severe reprimand to the negligent sculptor Sang-Po, who hasn’t finished the nephrite jade vases for which I sent him the designs personally more than two months ago.”

  “Very good!” said the captain. “Your commissions will be carried out, my dear friend; I’m only waiting for my provision of condensed carbon dioxide to leave. Ah. here it is! Au revoir!”

  A container was carried aboard, assuredly not as big as one of the trunks of which Parisian ladies make use to transport dresses and hats when
they go to spend a week in the country. We went back down into our small boat and the ship departed with the speed of an arrow.

  “May God spare her from shipwrecks and tempests!” I exclaimed.

  Azrael emitted a burst of laughter that caused my face to turn red. “Idiot!” she said. “What shipwrecks and what tempests can there be today, with the electric currents that control and deflect the winds and regulate submarine currents? Instead of saying and making me hear such silly things, let’s go back to the harbor and visit the fish-parks established there—in accordance, admittedly, with the very elementary ideas of Coste, a member of the Institut in the year of grace 1865, but to whom belongs, nevertheless, the honor of having conceived and realized the beginnings of pisciculture in France.95

  We returned to the shore and Azrael showed me immense parks formed by rocks cleverly arranged in such a fashion as to form vast compartments whose water was continually renewed by the sea without permitting the innumerable fish bred therein to escape.

  “Monsieur Carême-Dugléré,” said my friend to a young man with excellent manners who came toward us, “would you kindly do us the honors of these piscicultural basins. We’re expecting friends from Berlin imminently for dinner, who left that capital at noon, and we’ll choose, in the meantime, the fish that you’ll be kind enough to serve us.”

  “I’m at your disposal, Messieurs,” replied the young man. This is the lobster-park hollowed out under the rocks—for the animals in question like darkness and isolation. By contrast, the crayfish need air and light, so you’ll see them all in the middle of their compartment, even at the surface of the water, so numerous that their antennae resemble millions of blades of sea-grass. Alongside live the turbots, the conger eels, the soles, the dabs, the rays and a few new species imported from Oceania, which the Chinese have taught us to appreciate and to serve their delicate flesh at our tables. I mean the holothuria, those exquisite echinoderms with which trepang is made, and which people hesitated to eat a century ago because they were said to resemble leeches. Unicornfish, the immense American oysters that measure no less than twenty-five centimeters in circumference, clams, another great species of the Venus family, and oysters of every sort, and finally mussels, pullulate in the other parks you can see further away. As for the artificial grottoes overlooking the bank over there and surrounded on all sides by the sea, they’ve been constructed to acclimate the birds knows as salangana, to which bird’s-nest soup is owed; we harvest an average of a hundred and fifty thousand nests a year, which is barely enough for Parisian consumption.”