Paris Before the Deluge Read online

  Well-intentioned men always adapt, as well as they can, to the government to which they are subject. They know that they are a conquest, slaves to determination; they resign themselves, unable to do more with their pacific logic. Even if their bonds are sometimes too tight, a few cuts of the whip a little too sharp, tortures are sometimes too inquisitorial and cruel, they are scarcely roused. Even the most docile bird pecks the hand that chokes it, but the well-intentioned people of Atlantis would not, in the year two thousand three hundred and forty seven, have pecked anyone. Their cage was gilded, their chains were made of flowers, the code of ambition and despotism was sheltered by logic, the whiplashes were benevolent, the poisoned bread was cake, the murderer wore gloves and a smile on his lips and he only spoke to his victim politely and with an exceedingly touching respect.

  Thus, concludes our malign critic of Atlantis, these well-intentioned people could not have taken up the sword—except, I confess to their honor, he adds, that they let it happen; they even expressed wishes for the combat, softly sounding the charge, and singing the victory loudly.

  Then, they reflected...

  It is a fact, let us say, seriously, that the last revolution in the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz was not led by the protective associations; it is necessary to look further afield for the cause, in the murderous vices of the society of the day. Even the government and its voices had nothing to do with it; it would be wrong to accuse it, for what weight could it have had in a society so perverse?

  What could have become, then, of such a people, a people that no longer had anything but the duties and rights of narrow and interested convention, outside of strict logic. What could have become of a people that no longer had any generosity, any disinterest except in maxims that it no longer practiced, any fatherland, any laws except laws that lent themselves to all kinds of arbitrary interpretation? What could have become of a people in whom there was no longer anything but privileges everywhere, privileges of birth and titles, privileges of gold and boudoirs, privileges of camaraderie, before which merit, good well and need always fail; a people of aristocrats who had written equality into the laws and were clever enough to prove that all Atlanteans were equal? What could have become of a people who no longer had any honest men but cowards?

  History informs us cruelly, by showing us the condition of the Pah-ri-ziz Atlanteans in the year two thousand three hundred and forty-seven, the very year in which the first fires of their final revolution broke out.

  In that year, the ruler was King Atrimachis IV.

  King Atrimachis was a generous, great man with a just and impartial mind. He had reigned for ten years; he was only forty-five years old when he fell from the throne. He had succeeded his father, Evenor VII, an incapable man if ever there was one, who had succeeded one of his uncles, Gadirique I of sad memory, whose reign had made no small contribution to the collapse of the throne of his ancestors.

  Evenor was good, mild and peaceful in his character. The story of a misfortune or a suffering never found him insensitive; he would have liked all Atlanteans to be as happy as him—but he was afflicted by an intellectual apathy that approached imbecility. He had no suspicion of the duties of a head of state, so he did not reign, and did not seek to reign. A throne, for him, was merely a comfortable seat in which he could sleep at his ease, without worrying about today or tomorrow.

  Too unintelligent to understand people, he abandoned his authority to the ambitious, to the intriguers who governed in his name, who pillaged and drained the public treasury and sucked the sweat of laborers under the pretext of amelioration and progress.

  Under Gadirique, by contrast, pillage had been conducted arrogantly and unceremoniously, in his name. His intelligence was superior, but debased by his ardor for material enjoyments. For him, royalty was simply a Land of Cockayne, an Eldorado where gold rolled along the streets, where pleasures flowed in the gutters. His luxurious palace overflowed by day with guests engaged in ignoble feasting, and by night with courtesans of repulsive lasciviousness.

  His guests were his ministers.

  His obliging nocturnal companions were pensioners of the State, which they devoured with the appetite of ogresses.

  The people had ground their teeth at the sight of these costly ignominies, for the most precious of which they paid the expenses with their blood, but those ignominies had corrupted them.

  Following the example of the court, the aristocracy had begun to live life at full tilt, the bourgeoisie had imitated the aristocracy, and the little people had followed the example of the bourgeoisie. The appetite for luxury and pleasures had become universal, and to satisfy it, no indelicacy was repugnant, and no penalty deterred anyone, provided that they thought themselves clever enough to skirt the abyss of the law without falling into it.

  In the midst of all this family and public disorder, Atrimachis, the heir apparent, seemed to be forgotten. His father paid no attention to him except to wish that he might one day become as happy as himself. The young man therefore launched himself as he pleased into the life of the day, where he fortunately found more emptiness than he had expected, more disillusionment than real pleasure. His heart was, therefore, soon sated; his intelligence, however, was considerable and his will was good.

  His errors only served for his instruction; his natural and curious intelligence easily grasped the falseness of the philosophy of grandeur, with the result that when the time came to mount the throne of his father, he was ready. He was sufficiently educated, and he promised the Atlanteans a happiness that they had not known for a long time. But he could not provide all the riches and honors to satisfy everyone’s tastes. He could only give them sage laws, labor and daily bread.

  That was not the dream they had formulated. His good intentions foundered, therefore, against sloth and the love of luxury.

  Too philosophical to reign in those days, too disgusted with the world to have the energy that might have saved him, he folded his arms and waited tranquilly for the final hour of his life or the final hour of his reign.

  All his merit was, therefore, in being an honest man and devoting himself to private virtues, with which he did as much good as he could in his immediate surroundings. He did not believe that he was strong enough to do any more; public morality had arrived at a point of degradation so advanced that he dared not even try to raise its level. It was, in fact, bad, but everyone believed it to be good; the people thought that they were on the finest path to progress and high civilization. It would have been the glory of a great man to prove them wrong.

  Meanwhile, everyone was suffering; as usual, no one was occupied with that malaise, but the government was blamed for it.

  In any case, the situation was no longer tenable. What could be done about it? To push things to the extreme, to overthrow everything, would only be an exchange of miseries, the wisest people thought. They understood that the evil lay elsewhere, that Atrimachis would be difficult to replace, and that his government would only change its name.

  It would have required a God to govern the Atlanteans, or angels to obey.

  So the men of peace and good will, to acquit their conscience, contented themselves with merely asking for ameliorations, as if they were possible, while the restless men and the petty philosophers pushed with all their might for a revolution, regardless of the consequences.

  For a long time, but most especially in those days, Lutecian society had been divided into castes, which became increasingly accentuated. The principled ones were that of titled individuals, the potentates of finance and the wealthy; that of Buddhists, who only recognized God as a master; the bourgeoisie; and finally the proletariat. There had always been a permanent antagonism between all these castes, which sometimes burst out in a formidable manner. If, in days of discontentment, they sometimes made alliances, it was only to tear one another apart afterwards, on the day of division.

  Tossed about in the midst of them, the government had sometimes favored one and sometimes another, accord
ing to where it believed it could find the elements of success, but when the time came, it no longer found in the others anything but adversaries who were all the more redoubtable because they were more animated.

  That state of affairs lasted a long time in the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz, and was then effaced, giving birth to another kind of danger by giving birth to another kind of enemy—enemies all the more terrible because they based their claims on public rights, on the natural aspirations of the people, which they highlighted, and everyday grievances that were tangible to everyone.

  Those enemies became ardent, political and proud, talking on an equal footing with the highly placed members of the governmental hierarchy, and people listened to them, sensing that they had strength—as, indeed, they had.

  Those men did not form a distinct caste; they recruited support everywhere, but they had a historical past, a genealogy that went back a long way. It was found in all evolutionary epochs, in all social upheavals.

  Among them there were good men who had a keen sense of their rights, natural human rights. There were also, unfortunately, ambitious men who had not yet found the prominent positions they coveted, men of restless character, unquiet and desirous minds who found themselves out of place in the sphere in which they lived. There were men that nothing ever satisfied, utopians, bunglers, arrogant petty tyrants. Finally, there were all the men in eternal opposition, men impossible in any society.

  These people gave themselves the good name of democrats or republicans, and under that seductive name, which only ever speaks of rights, respectable because they are essentially true, and of generous projects, of civilization, rational progress, fraternal solidarity—a name that represents to humankind its reason for being, its social rationale, the primitive social contract without which association might never have taken place—under that name, those people had become an important power in the time of Atrimachis, for the majority of the country had united with them, as reminders of public interests in peril.

  Even the king did not feel the courage to resist them to his own advantage, because he understood that they were right.

  II. The God Chephren

  The time was, therefore, ripe for a change of administration, but the respect that everyone had for the virtues of King Atrimachis, the recognition that was alive in all hearts for his good will and his constant efforts to spread wellbeing around him, delayed the catastrophe until his death.

  That death occurred in the year two thousand three hundred and forty-seven, but it arrived too soon, because, in spite of all the muted conspiracies of the few and, in spite of the expressed desires of the many, no one was ready on the day of need. They were able to demolish, but they were not able to reconstruct, and the various pretentions of the pilots who took over the direction of the ship of state only contrived fruitless and perilous experiments.

  The boldest and the less capable spoke loudly, so loudly that practical minds and men of good will drew away from them in order to avoid dangerous conflicts, perhaps more dangerous than the provisional administration that was installed, waiting for the appeasement of evil passions which they feared aggravating further by attempting to control them.

  That retreat was a misfortune that everyone felt but no one admitted, for the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz was abandoned from that day on to the utopists, the ambitious and the madmen who thought that a people could be guided like a flock of feeble and fearful children. The wisest people could, in consequence, see clearly that their country was running precipitately to its ruin. But what could they do? Nothing, except weep for the dying fatherland and say prayers for it.

  Among those people there was then in Lutecia a considerable individual who was, before anything else, a good man. That was the philosopher—or, as he was called, the god—Chephren.

  Chephren was still young, although he was known in Lutecia as “old Chephren.” In the Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz, as in its maternal African Atlantis and a number of other antediluvian peoples, judging that old age had all the virtues of prudence and wisdom, and the knowledge that long experience gives, people often qualified as “old” anyone who possessed those virtues—hence the considerable number of years that were credited to several individuals of that epoch.

  Now, Chephren was a very “old” man, because he had all those virtues to a supreme degree.

  Profoundly possessed since childhood with a sense of human dignity, human rights and human duties, he had devoted all the force of his intelligence and all his studies to the philosophy of beautiful souls who saw nothing but the good to be done. No science was strange to him; he had studied them all, seeking the unknown and mysterious in all of them, the unknowns of human origin and human destiny. In order to devote himself to that task more easily, and not to be distracted by any other affection or any other duty, he had renounced the charms of the family.

  If the life of the god Chephren had been one of continual study, however, he had not made that study from his fireside. No one, perhaps, traveled as widely in the world as him. Everywhere, he examined the various types of humankind, dissected their habits and their mores, comparing them with one another; he searched the remotest and least known nooks and crannies, the oldest and most obscure histories. He dug in the ground in all directions, descended into the deepest caverns, and scrutinized the most deserted rocks lost in the immensity of the seas.

  And when he returned to his homeland, laden with the prodigious booty of his knowledge, he spread the fruits of his research everywhere with the prodigality of good taste that everyone knew to be his inclination, and recompensed him duly, for his reputation became immense.

  He thought that it was time to profit from the ascendancy that he had to ameliorate public mores. He saw his principles held in such great esteem; people cited them everywhere; his veracity was highly praised, his justice lauded on all sides. People no longer approached him without talking about the god Chephren; many people no longer paid any attention to anything but his words, his deeds, and even his weaknesses—for he was not perfect—and took pride in imitating him in everything. People no longer swore except by the old god Chephren; that was the fashion.

  Like any fashion, however, that one passed. It had been taken too far, too ardently for there not to be a passionate reaction against it.

  The clear-sighted mind of Chephren, who could not discover beneath the civilization of the Atlanteans and in their mores anything but prejudices, errors and egotism—disguised vices, in sum—made the generous error of not sparing them, of attacking them, of preaching harsh truths to people who did not want to know them any longer, of criticizing the pleasant vices that they caressed lovingly, of saying to thieves: “Be disinterested!” and to assassins: “Protect your brethren!”

  People did not take long to find it inconvenient and intolerable: a bizarre and ill-conceived philosophy. The boldest launched sarcasms at him that found favor with the public; he was no longer called anything but the prophet of doom, the god of tempests, or the old man of the mountain—because he never ceased representing civilization as a mountain that all peoples ought to climb, and he committed the crime of showing the people of Pah-ri-ziz heading down the slope of that mountain, at the bottom of which was the chasm in which they would be engulfed.

  The most disciplined, the men of good company, who only ever insulted people politely and wittily, no longer called him anything but old Nholh-Chephren. Nholh, in the Atlantean language, was the equivalent of our word “recluse.”23 For them it was an epithet of derision, which referred to the forced retreat into which the forgetfulness of the world had thrown him.

  Public opinion was too keenly stimulated with regard to the philosopher for the government, which was no wiser than public opinion, not to think it appropriate to intervene in the mater. It was bound to find Chephren’s spoken and written preaching unhealthy; he was hauled before the bars of its tribunals, which would inevitably have condemned him but for the veto of King Atrimachis, who held him in the highest esteem
and loved him dearly, even though Chephren belonged to the breed of democrats. The king respected conviction everywhere, and he knew that an honest man of conviction has never been and never will be a danger to the adversary of his opinion.

  The philosopher was thus not crushed by the courts, but he took it as a warning. He ceased his importunate preaching; he no longer wrote and he no longer spoke, shutting himself away in unapproachable retreat where he devoted himself to studies that absorbed all his time and all his faculties, seeking to resolve by strange experiments a problem that had been posed to the world for a long time, but had never been resolved.

  That problem, which was grave, interesting, and an object of legitimate curiosity, which agitated the profound thinkers and, it is necessary to say in praise of the epoch, the masses of ordinary people, was this:

  Where did humans come from? Had there been a first man? How had that first man come into being?

  Opinions, of course, were fervently divided, and as with any insoluble question, or very nearly, the debate was very animated: affirmations and theories were infinitely various.

  The belief emitted in the sacred books of Buddhism written by the divine Sylax more than a thousand years before that epoch was that God had created humans by a single act of will, as He had created all the other beings in the universe.

  The sacred books maintained a prudent silence as to the epoch of that creation. Moreover, they did not advance that belief as an article of faith, but merely as a conventional belief—debatable, at any rate. The Buddhism of Sylax, as we have seen, was possessed of a polite tolerance. The influence of the philosopher Me-nu-tche is easily recognizable therein.

  The field of combat therefore being open, everyone threw themselves into it head first.

  Some who were devotees nevertheless, were convinced the God had made a statue of earth and then had animated it with the breath of his mouth.