Paris Before the Deluge Page 9

  That is a pretty invention, replied the adversaries of that belief, but provide us with proof. It is not sufficient to tell us what God could have done, what He wanted to do and that He did what you say. Were you there? Your assertion is insufficient. For our part, they added, we have another belief, and one that does not lack evidence. Follow our reasoning carefully...

  Their reasoning it is necessary to admit was more scholarly, but it was not more convincing. In any case, it had multiple versions.

  Some claimed that the first human had been entirely constituted by the combination of atoms, either hooked or at various angles, but at any rate sufficiently well-shaped to form the beautiful whole that we know, by virtue of a sympathetic aggregation.

  Others found in the electricity of molecules enough intelligent forces to compose a human, provided that one went back to a sky and favorable conditions that were unknown, or no longer known.

  Others claimed that there had once been in nature, at least in certain conditions unfortunately unspecifiable, fecund forces that had all the human generative properties, and that it would be useful to research.

  Others, finally, based on the same theory, which they specified more categorically, affirmed that the opinion was true and that humans had been born from nothing—which is to say, from very little—by the spontaneous generation of some insects, an animate atom, which, improving under the influence of a special cause, had taken on increasingly perfect proportions in mounting the scale of generation, always under the influence of a special cause that they could not characterize, but which must exist in nature, or must at least have existed one day, perhaps only for one day, perhaps even one minute.

  That question, to which we no longer attach much importance today, because we believe it to have been resolved, was taken very seriously by the antediluvian Atlanteans, either because it was of more recent provenance among them or because they had more reasons than us for not accepting a definitive solution.

  It was to that question that the god Chephren attached himself most ardently in his retreat, where he devoted himself to experimentation that his adversaries and enemies turned to ridicule, calling him eccentric, bizarre, cabalistic—or even a maniac, according to some.

  In any case, that mania rendered them an immense service, as we shall see.

  The city of Lutecia was vast, extending over an immense plain strewn with mounds and rocks, which still retained all the imprints left therein by the erosion of the seawater under which they had been obliged to reside. The population was very large, and, as a great many houses were not very high because of the intensity of the heat, which was only tempered at certain times of day by sea breezes, one can imagine the vast expanse that they had to occupy.

  All the private houses, and there were a great many, had only two stories, one of them hollowed out or built at the expense of the rocks and mounds, the other dominating that kind of basement in the form of tents made of textiles or animal hides, according to the wealth of the residents.

  The tallest houses served as rental properties. They had four stories, ordinarily topped by a kind of belvedere in the form of a tent, similar in kind to those of private houses.

  Lutecia extended further to the north than the south; to the south it was limited, in one part of its territory only, by a kind of desert of which no one made advantageous use and even seemed to be avoided. That terrain was stony, scored in all directions by sheer and deep crevices filled with stagnant and noisome water and filth of all kinds. It was also enveloped by broad ravines, sinuous and extreme, bristling with menacing rocks and hideous caverns, whose pestilential walls continually oozed green-tinted water.

  The municipal administration had finally decided to fill in that inferno, from which fever and disease erupted from time to time. It had understood the necessity for a long time, but had always been stopped by an idea that had a certain respectability.

  Tradition indicated that location as the retreat of the founder of the Atlantean religion, and a few passages in the sacred books revealed it as such. It was there that the spirit of God had come to take the Buddha Sylax and carry him to Heaven, from which he had returned a few days later to fetch the gods Me-nu-tche and Lutetius: a charming legend that, for those of us who know the history of the three friends, reveals to us in poetic terms that Sylax died first and did not take long to be joined in the tomb by his two friends.

  For the Atlanteans, however, the Buddha and his associates had literally flown to the heavens, from which they would return one day to bring rewards to the faithful Pah-ri-ziz and convey them to a better life, while they would imprison miscreants in an unapproachable island from which they could never emerge, where they would be devoured by hideous and ferocious beasts that would make them suffer all the horrors of a cruel death without allowing them to die.

  It is obvious that Me-nu-tche had not written that page of the sacred books, and that even the worthy Sylax had wanted to frighten the incorrigible and wicked, to whom one cannot show too many hideous images of remorse, even if one has to charge them with the darkest colors of the imagination. The imagination can never exaggerate the depiction of vice and the torments that are due to it.

  Now, the philosopher Chephren offered to take responsibility for sanitizing that inferno on condition that the property in it would be assured to him, and also on the condition—imposed by the city—that the terrain would conserve its original appearance, to the extent that that could be reconciled with the objective to be attained.

  The genius of the philosopher succeeded perfectly in his operations. A large bed of sufficient depths, without escarpments, was opened to the interior waters lurking in the filthy crevices. The crevices were filled in; the entire terrain conserved its ravines, which served it as both a boundary and a protection, giving passage to the interior waters and mingling its own with the stream that had been dug.24

  He thus made himself a charming habitation, as useful for his studies as it was healthy for everyone. He would have been able to obtain an immense profit from it if he had been a speculator.

  He therefore installed himself there, resolved not to emerge again for any reason whatsoever, and to seek in the labor of his intelligence and the scientific booty that he had amassed over the years to forget the disillusionment that the ingratitude of his fellow citizens had caused him to experience.

  It was in vain, however, that he sequestered himself from the world; the world followed him everywhere with its eyes and its sarcasms. The scientific installations that he built for his experiments were monitored maliciously.

  He was of the opinion that sought to reproduce humans from nothing, to draw them out of oblivion—or, to put it better, to make a human with a substance that did not appear to have that destination, for Chephren was not an atheist. He thought that everything had a cause, that matter had not been created alone, that there was in addition a principle to which it would have been wrong to give a material and palpable name, but evident, nameless for him, and which had created humankind as well as everything else.

  He thought, however, that the principle in question was not destroyed forever, that it was not impossible for it to create several times more a creature that it had already created at least once, and that it would be as well to research the conditions suitable for obtaining the same result himself.

  That was his great preoccupation. The knowledge he had acquired, the environment in which he lived—which was very different from ours today—perhaps gave him the right to hope for a success that appears impossible to us, but which might not be in the future.

  III. Chephren’s Ark

  The scientific occupations of the god Chephren were not alone in being lacerated by the mockery of his enemies and frivolous individuals; even his habitation received no mercy from them—not, of course, on account of the fine result of the salubriousness that he had brought about there and which no one could deny, but for various particularities of accommodation that could, in fact, seem rather singular
at first glance.

  The philosopher Chephren was, as we have said, a great observer, a great thinker and a great logician; he was an earnest man, seriously weighing up past and present facts in order to draw practical inductions therefrom whenever he could.

  Now, science tells us and history does not allow us to ignore that in the oldest times of our knowledge, especially in antediluvian times, waters were widely expanded over the earth, to the point that we cannot say for sure whether there were any veritable continents. The regions called by that name are nothing but vast terrains, it is true, immense but furrowed in all directions by rivers, lakes and marshes, around which one always ends up encountering the sea.

  Science also tells us, and history supports it with its authority, that in those remote times volcanic eruptions were frequent, and that immersions and emersions of islands, even large islands, were everyday events; inundations, either by torrential rains due to the vast extent of the seas, by the overflowing of rivers and lakes, or by sudden invasions of the sea, were frightful, burying entire countries, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently.

  Everyone knows what the ancients report to us about a few inundations of which they retain a religious memory and which they converted into pious legends. They had been so devastating that they had created a word to designate them: the word Deluge.

  The philosopher Chephren, who was not ignorant of anything and did not forget anything, had calculated that all the catastrophes of which his forefathers had transmitted the memory to him, and all those he had seen in his numerous and distant voyages, and all those of which he had palpable evidence close at hand, were bound to recur some day. The work that nature was doing on the coasts, the subterranean rumbles that his ear caught in all directions, the unusual changes in the level of the Sequanian Sea, and something whispering in the scientist’s heart and mind, told him that the time was imminent, and he wanted to be ready for it.

  As soon as he had completed the sanitization of the retreat that guaranteed the present for him, therefore, he thought about the future. That was not the least ridiculous thing for which he was reproached. People were able to do that when they had sufficiently frivolous minds to want to judge what they could not understand, so strange did his work appear, contrasting with normal habits.

  The philosopher had pitched his habitation tent in the middle of his terrain, but beside that tent he constructed a large, solid vessel with different compartments. As soon as it was finished, he took up residence therein with the animals that he kept on his island for is experiments. He stored provisions of food therein, and all the objects indispensable for a long voyage.

  It must be agreed that building such an ark in the middle of a field in order to live in it, and also fitting it out for a long and perilous voyage that was only a dream, was a fine subject of conversation for ill-intentioned neighbors, but the philosopher let them talk. He continued his work, continually renewing his food stories and taking personal care of the maintenance of his ark with all the attention of a castaway constructing his escape raft.

  One evening, in the year two thousand three hundred and forty-eight, a year after the death of Atrimachis and the revolution of the Pah-ri-ziz,25 he had just concluded the customary round he made to observe the transformations undergone by the various animals that he had placed in environments and conditions suitable to obtain the results for which he hoped, and he had gone back into his vessel in order to reflect there at his ease, when he suddenly found himself face to face with a stranger that he was not expecting.

  “I’m Dr. Plunos,” said the newcomer, bowing profoundly before the man he had come to visit.

  “Welcome, Dr. Plunos,” the philosopher relied, with a gentle smile, offering him a seat. “I’m happy to see you, for you too, I believe, are one of today’s accursed.”

  “I am one of today’s accursed,” the doctor relied, “And I’m very honored by it, for I’m like you, and am cursed by the same people that curse you. Today is not a day of wisdom and moderation, which ought never to be forgotten by people who represent themselves as civilized and progressive.”

  The doctor smiled and continued: “It’s true that they have the principles of civilization, they dream of its institutions, and they have their sacred books, outside of which there is no salvation—but look at what they make of those who are not of their petty church. You they curse because you preach moderation, conciliation, tolerance and effective fraternity in democracy; me they curse because I’m a skeptic who only believes in science, who only courts science, and who laughs at their politics and socialism as one laughs at sibylline oracles that say yes or no at the whim of interested parties.”

  The doctor went on: “Change humankind, my friend; render it good, just, disinterested, patriotic, and I shall be yours; if not, no. What does it matter to me, who wants nothing in the world but to live peacefully, whether ambitious and egotistical man at the head of the society into which hazard has cast me is called a sheikh, a king, a president or an archon? As long as he’s a man, his fine language doesn’t seduce me; I know that he’ll act as a man—which is to say, in his own interests. So much the better if mine can adapt to that.

  “But pardon me; I haven’t come to see you in order to speak ill of my fellows but to learn from you the wisdom that people deny you, but which you nevertheless practice so well, it seems to me, and to discover the objective of your projects—if that would not be indiscreet.”

  “Pardon me, too, Doctor,” the philosopher replied, “and be kind enough reply before anything else to my curiosity. I don’t want to speak ill of my fellows either, but I’ve long been a stranger to the affairs of my nation, which is in great turmoil, I believe, and I’d like to learn from a man as competent as you to judge where their affairs stand. Are there still any royalists since the death of Atrimachis? What are they doing? What are the republicans doing?”

  “The royalists are pitilessly proscribed; those who could have fled abroad; those who could not have been thrown into the sea with their hands and feet bound and an enormous stone tied around their neck, by order of the republicans.

  “The republicans cannot agree among themselves how to found a sage and prosperous State; each one has his own petty system in his pocket, which he wants above all to prevail, and in order to succeed, persuasion not being sufficient, he employs violence. To that effect, each pretender has assembled disciples, aides and soldiers, and marches with his head held high, weapons at the ready and a warrant of proscription and death always in his hand, not only against the royalists, and not only against the dissidents, but against the suspect. The suspect are the people who do not rally quickly enough to his banner—with the result that I’m beginning to fear for myself.

  “There are a few moderates among them, though: they only want to rob the rich, reduce genius to the level of stupidity, and equalize profits and fortunes in order to recruit devoted and incapable acolytes—in sum, to trouble a natural order that will assert itself some day in spite of them, and of which they are perhaps asking no more than to reduce the fortunate to their own level or to elevate themselves to theirs.”

  “So the camp is divided,” said the philosopher Chephren, sadly.

  “The camp is divided.”

  “The poor fools! To have such a beautiful throne in their hands, in democracy; such a beautiful code, in fraternity; and such a fine objective to attain, in progress, civilization and happiness; and to squander and dishonor all of that for the sake of petty ambition and reckless pride! Oh, my fatherland, my fatherland! But who are these men, then?”

  “Orators, second-rate writers, clubmen—in sum, people of petty views from all classes, who think themselves important because they have a fluent pen, words to hand, and will find themselves devoid of status if they can’t obtain an important position in the republic.”

  “Poor Atlantis of the Pah-ri-ziz!” exclaimed the philosopher. “You shall share the fate of thousands of peoples who have preceded us!” The god Cheph
ren took on a prophetic tone: “To have so much sap, so much future, and only to live a thousand years! To be on the edge of the abyss and to argue over a preeminence of such short duration! To dance on a volcano instead of providing for one’s safety and the safety of all!”

  “Is that not your wisdom, philosopher Chephren?” said the doctor, in an interrogative tone, thus arriving at the purpose of his visit. “Is it not to provide for your safety that you’ve constructed an ark?”

  “Yes—an ark that people laugh at; an ark that they’ll soon envy me, I’m sure, for the time is near when the earth will undergo a frightful cataclysm, when the sea will race over the seas, and over humans, and lands will be engulfed in volcanoes that are already rumbling; and the man who is so proud today, who aspires to live in a palace and hold the scepter of a master in his hand will be happy to find a plank, some miserable piece of debris, in order to escape the fury of the waves…but let’s leave it there; I’m a madman, I’m a Nholh. Talk to me about honest people; console me by telling me that there are men who honor our principles.”

  IV. Man and Beast

  Dr. Plunos did not reply to the philosopher’s question, and lowered his head.

  “Atlas, however,” Chephren went on, “the young Atlas who is so great today, and whom I’ve always admired since his sojourn in Sylacea, where he occupied such a minimal and precarious position, but in which he already showed so much wisdom and energy—isn’t Atlas a rude jouster in the republican lists? In spite of the glory with which he has covered himself, in spite of the prosperity in which the republic has established him in recompense for his services, is he not still good, wise, a modest patriot and a true democrat? Does he not still open his window to listen to the plaints of those who are suffering, and keep his door ajar in order that those in need can open it when they will?