Paris Before the Deluge Page 7

  For himself, he openly renounced the perfection of chastity and took as wives the two women whom he had thus far taken for companions in his apostolate.

  In the last days of his old age, the days when reason alone speaks to the soul, and the eye of intelligence sees without passion and without prejudice, he even modified the spirit of his religion, to the point of making an imperious precept of marriage, which remained in the laws of Atlantis.

  The Buddha’s marriage brought together once again the two families that had been separated by secret interests and intolerant thoughts. Everyone’s happiness seemed greater for it.

  That happiness soon became perfect.

  VII. The Cradle of a Great People

  It was a little over a year since the castaways had run aground on the island, and they had no idea how long the horrible sequestration would last that had taken them away from their families, their friends and all the hopes to which youth and a good social situation give rise.

  They lived there in isolation, abandoned by the entire world, never seeing anything that could give them any hope of another future. They had no doubt that the desert had been inhabited one day, but it had been so completely forgotten by that time that no one came close to it from nearby or far away, and no one even seemed to suspect that it still existed. It had required the crazy expedition of a few extraordinary scholars to discover it, and it was scarcely probable that a similar desire would overtake others.

  Sylax consoled himself for that in the bittersweetness of his fortunate sin; Me-nu-tche was mortally sad; and Lutecia continued to hope.

  She was right, for one day, a number of pirogues were spotted, loaded with people, who were striving to reach the shore.

  It was an expedition of Teutchs and Pah-ri-ziz; they were relatives and friends.

  Despairing of seeing his daughter come back, as she had promised him, and convinced against all reason that she was in some danger from which he might be able to free her, Lutetius had decided set forth in search of her. To that effect, he had fitted out several pirogues, on which he had embarked the bravest of the Teutchs and the Pah-ri-ziz; then he had left, brandishing his mace and swearing to do battle even with the goddess of death in order to see his only child again.

  The god of the seas had guided him generously, and the god of fathers had returned his dear Lutecia to him. He asked no more of God than that, and no more of the world.

  The island where he landed was deserted, but it appeared to be as fecund as that of the Teutchs; he could create a retreat there as enviable as any other. Nothing, moreover, drew him back to his homeland; he did not regret either its riches or its honors. He wanted to be anywhere that the daughter might be whom he had lost among the Teutchs. He therefore resolved to settle there.

  His project was agreed by everyone. It was, therefore, no longer a matter of living alone, isolated in the middle of uncrossable seas with sad memories of the shipwreck; it was a matter of creating a new fatherland, a society, and linking it with subsequent relationships to all the places where each of them had left memories.

  One happiness never comes alone, says the wisdom of nations. A beaten path is soon frequented by everyone, says another.

  While the Teutchs and the Pah-ri-ziz, joining the castaways on the island, took possession of the vast domain in the name of an incontestable right, and settled there, new guests arrived from various islands in the region, which no one knew and which had not been perceived until then.

  Several days later, they saw more pirogues of emigrants prowling around them, which dared not land. They came from the direction of the isle of the Teutchs, notably from Sequania. They were friends; they were given the most amicable reception.

  The colony thus became sizeable; it was necessary to think of organizing it, of dividing up the land, exploiting it advantageously, ameliorating it, and increasing cultivation as much as possible—in sum, rendering it habitable for everyone and prosperous.

  For that, however, division was not sufficient; the leaders of the colony were wise, prudent and experienced men, and they understood that. They resolved to define everyone’s rights and duties, in order that there could be no argument or misunderstanding in the relationships of the new associates, so that the necessary harmony and prosperity of the association would not cease to reign everywhere and in all things.

  A clear and concise code was immediately drawn up by the most skillful, and then submitted to everyone, in order that anyone could offer observations thereon. Finally, a general assembly was held, and the code was discussed calmly and clearly, and definitively voted.

  The name of the island, which everyone until then had designated at whim in accordance with their impressions, was fixed. To satisfy the memories of Sylax and his friend on the one hand, and those of Lutetius and his friends on the other, it was decided that the island would be called the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz.

  The Sequans called the arm of the sea that enveloped them the Sequanian Sea.

  The few huts that had been built for a primary shelter, and which soon multiplied, firming the center of a government that did not lack a certain luster, took the name of Lutecia.

  Lutetius was proclaimed the chief of the new state, with a council composed of Me-nu-Tche and nine other members. The chief in question was not a king, nor a sheikh, not an archon, nor a consul. The law alone and the people were all that. Lutetius was only charged with overseeing the observation of the law. Every time that it seemed to him to have been infringed, he referred the matter to the council, who called the delinquents to order. If there were difficulties in re-establishing the force of the law, the popular comitias were summoned, the Head of State and his council informed them, and the people judged.

  No one had yet imagined having Heaven intervene in that business and accepting kings by divine right or kings as the saviors of nations. Nor had anyone judged it appropriate to create castes obtaining all their strength and credit from their gold, their privileged position or their dignities. Everyone collaborated to the same ends, everyone had the same rights and duties, accepted by everyone, and everything went well, because everyone was useful to the community, like the organs of the same body.

  All the relationships between the citizens of the little nascent state seemed sufficiently well established for no one to complain very much.

  Sylax, who had not ceased preaching, was named as the great Buddha. The scholars, and all the people with them, had thought and proclaimed, without the philosopher Me-nu-tse putting up any opposition, that it would be useful to preach a religious belief and manifest it publicly. Some thought it an essential social bond, others merely useful, but all of them thought it respectable.

  Under this regime, which was modified from time to time in accordance with need, the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz prospered. Its soil was ameliorated, a few changes in sea level sometimes adding a portion of land to the shore and sometimes a small island in the vicinity, with the result that a time came when the Atlantis found itself possessed of considerable territory and an imposing strength.

  In sum, the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz became, in time, a great country and a great people: one of the most civilized peoples of ancient times. Its history was brilliant and full of marvels.

  It reigned for more than a thousand years.

  I shall leave to others the care of recounting its splendors and the prodigies of its glory. For my part, I shall only take the eve of the catastrophe that bore it away, in order to recount a few more episodes—which will, however, sufficiently depict the decadence and the death-throes of a great nation.

  PART TWO

  THE ATLANTIS OF THE PAH-RI-ZIZ

  I. How a Great People Falls

  At its origin, as we have just seen, the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz only thought of ensuring each of its members their daily bread and the labor necessary to achieve that objective.

  It ought not to be congratulated for that, because that is merely what all peoples—those who associate themselv
es in order to contend more effectively with the vicissitudes of life—do at their commencement. One gives no thought, in those days, to causing the bird-lime of fortune, honors, distinctions and privileges to shine in the eyes of associates. The necessary and the useful are sufficient for everyone.

  That is certainly not because it would have been very difficult for the founders of the new empire to take possession of favors and wealth, palaces and thrones, for themselves, their families and their friends, or even to obtain them with the apparent legitimacy of a general vote on the part of the little colony.

  Lutetius, Me-nu-tche and Sylax were not novices in social and political life; they were perfectly well aware of the art of imposing on people—but they were, above all else, benevolent and honest men, and they did not abuse their ascendancy over their brethren, nor their ignorance, nor the embarrassment of their position.

  Thus, they only decreed what was useful and good, only keeping for themselves just sufficient authority and supremacy to maintain good order and to guide the nascent State toward prosperity

  The successive needs of different times sometimes modified their laws, but did not change them. Their laws were, moreover, regarded for a long time as sacred laws, for Lutetius, Sylax and Me-nu-tche, several centuries after the foundation of the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz, were no longer what our history tells us, but individuals miraculously born to accomplish a divine mission.

  Time had thus thrown its veil over the memory of the three friends, whom devotees had embellished with a highly sentimental legend that they recited with great religious faith—a faith worthy of all respect, at any rate, since it consoled them in their afflictions and rendered them happy.

  Whatever happened, so long as that belief reigned, Atlantis was happy, as much, at least, as egotistical, versatile and envious human beings can be under the scepter of association. As I am not composing a pastoral but a philosophical history, I do not want to depict people other than they are, and the Atlanteans as perfect, biting into rocks of honey and slaking their thirst in streams of milk—but all in all, they were happy, I repeat, so long as they retained the code of Lutetius, and they retained it for a long time.

  Under its influence, the Pah-ri-ziz prospered, and grew in a prodigious manner. Lutecia, their capital, acquired an unusual splendor; it even increased to the point of being a power in the land in its own right.

  There came a day, however, when that growth of wealth and power overexcited the imagination of the Atlanteans, who yielded to the love of gold, pleasure and enjoyments of every sort, and then to culpable ambition.

  That ambition, the ambition of egotism and pride, finally burst forth among them; after several centuries of almost continuous peace, social and governmental tempests brought them once again to the brink of ruination, instead of bringing them the wealth that they had promised them.

  In that remote era, in periods of revolution, they already had for watchwords the seductive devices employed today: progress, fraternity, public order. Alas, then as now, there was nothing in them. Such mottoes were merely the bait of fishermen, for they never produced anything in Atlantis but disorder and interested mutations. One saw them proclaimed, sometimes by ambitious despots, who, in the name of public good, took possession of the reins of empire for themselves and their descendants, thus creating hatreds and disastrous rivalries for the future, and sometimes by ambitious individuals of a different sort, who, not daring to offer themselves as heads of dynasties, represented themselves as liberators of a people that was not in jeopardy, thus slaking their avid cupidity and passion for domination.

  In what epoch, however, did these symptoms of decadence commence? History does not say.

  The Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz declined, in all probability, slowly and gradually, occasionally throwing off sparks of heroism, science and patriotic devotion. It fell little by little over centuries, until the day when it finally saw its supreme period arrive, two thousand three hundred and forty seven years before our era: the period when the heart of every Atlantean beat as on the eve of a strange and decisive event.

  Now, in that year, the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz was in great turmoil. A new evolutionary whirlwind had just carried away its government, and the revolution, embarrassed by its victory, did not cease making trials of administration that profoundly troubled the nation—the material interests of the nation, I ought to say, in the interests of clarity, for minds had already been troubled for a long time by evil passions, as many public as private.

  There was no longer any question, in those days, of the paternal laws of the divine Lutetius. The benevolence and frankness that had dictated them had fallen into an even greater forgetfulness. At that time, no one any longer had anything but personal desires and aspirations, which were far from tending to social and political unity, the commonweal and the prosperity of the fatherland. There was no fatherland any longer; there was no longer anything but an association accepted for the sake of private interests, like a profitable exploitation, and nothing more.

  Lutecian society, which arrogated the right of primacy in everything, set the tone for the rest of the country, and, in truth, the country gained no advantage from that, for the capital was even more corrupt in its principles than the nation. Its principles, it is true, had the aroma of a superior civilization; they were more refined and more polite, and also bolder and more cunning. Theft was good there, provided that it took on the soothing allures of good taste; murder was not a crime there, provided that it was committed with gloves on and presented itself under a borrowed name. Ignominy was, in sum, the order of high society, but in sentimental disguise.

  Sentiment, among that people, had become the watchword of fine speech; it was everywhere, public law and private law. General opinion as nourished by its words and deeds; in sum, in the shadow of sentiment, everything was dormant, the law as well as the occasional good man. A sentimental expression legitimated all vices, excused all crimes, and honored all sins. Things had reached the point that an honest man, a man whose principles were uncompromised and undisguised, was shamed and vilified, and only presented himself to the law trembling, for fear of finding himself facing a skillful adversary who was able to evoke the necessary sentiment.

  With principles so false, it ought to be understandable that it was very difficult for a moralist to unmask evil and the guilty—especially powerful guilty parties in whose interest it was to remain masked—so it was not permissible to tell the truth, as soon as it wounded someone. There were laws to stop indiscreet pens and voices; there was a public opinion that imposed silence.

  The culpable and the cowardly, in high and low places, could thus prevaricate without fear, pillage, embezzle and abuse their credit in order to obtain enjoyments, to obtain gold. The law protected them; to speak of their misdeeds was treated as defamation.

  And the strangest thing of all about that aberration of the people is that there had never been more talk of virtue, of benevolence, never so much boasting about one’s merits and morality. Its statistics were all glorious. Its leaders were irreproachable in their disinterest, its magistrates admirable in their enlightenment, justice and devotion; its civilization was visibly growing, its population becoming increasingly perfect.

  Poor people! Blind people! Could two of those panegyrists encounter one another without bursting into riotous laughter?

  It is true to say, however, to be fair, that science had perhaps never risen so high as in those times; that in industry of the Atlanteans was prodigious then; that their civilization had all the most gracious and perfect forms; that the art of fine speaking was ravishing among them; in sum, that their knowledge and skill were so highly-developed and so subtle that with its aid, they could aspire to anything...

  The government, for its part, was no longer a benevolent and conciliating father of a family but an acidic crucible of egotistic interests; its administrations were no more than factories of arbitrariness and petty tyrannies.

  The arbitrary and
the tyrannical had become, in the last times of that empire, so pestilential, so insupportable that several associations were formed, which became very important, to resist the encroachments and abuses of administrations large and small, in the hope of thus restricting them to their rights and duties. The means were good; they were legal; everyone understood that.

  The sane individuals, in associating, had not wanted to paralyze the necessary operation of administrations, much less had they wanted to protest and conspire against the utility and good will of their creation and functioning; they had merely wanted to raise a dyke against the degeneration of the spirit of their institutions, to the malevolence of the vital hand that always moves machines of that sort. The vital hand is not always that of the master, that of the superior leader, or the responsible man who shines at the summit, but often that of a subaltern chief, or even sometimes an underling, one alone, who calls himself the administration, who speaks in the name of the administration, and attacks from within that fortress anything that threatens to breach it.

  In order to resist that malevolent administration-man, whose perfidious hand strikes in the name of authority, in the name of a respectable principle, it was, in fact, necessary not to be alone with one’s rights in facing him; something more was necessary: the word of an association and the weight of an association.

  What harm could there be in that?

  And yet, it is that association that malcontents have accused of the inopportune invasion of the latest revolution to turn the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz upside down.

  They had nothing to do with it, says one jovial critic of the times,22 for those associations were made of up well-intentioned men, and well-intentioned men are not equipped to raise shields and wield weapons; it requires more energy than they have, and more enthusiasm.