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CHAPTER ONE

AT THE ARISTOTLE FOUNDATION

The Aristotle Foundation, due to the specific legacies and the generosity of a number of Australian and American bankers, is somewhat analogous to what the Institut Pasteur was three centuries ago—with the difference that the latter was devoted to the study of the microbes (as one said then) that were believed to assault the human organism from without, and the juices, or sera, capable of curing the diseases caused by those microbes. Since the advent of the theory of cellular energy, itself creative of benevolent and harmful microorganisms, neither independently nor by means of products and chemical extracts, but by virtue of the new force named cyton.

The Aristotle Foundation is devoted to the study of all the forms, variants and transformations of cyton—of which the history is rather unimportant now, in view of the criticisms to which it has been subjected. These repeated criticisms, some of which are well-founded, have weakened our theoretical studies and laboratory work with regard to cyton to such a extent that we can no longer do anything, so to speak, except discuss between ourselves the events of the day, new armaments and methods of combat, and the rivalries—economic or otherwise—between nations.

A gossip-mongering bear-garden, that is what our venerable institution has become. It is the same for all the foundations of the same category in Europe and America, whose decrepitude and decay have been the object of numerous discouraging theses.

When I arrived the next day at my laboratory—or, more exactly, my talking shop—my male and female colleagues where all discussing the exciting aphanasia of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, which filled the papers and wireless broadcasts. I was surrounded and bombarded with questions, to which I replied as best I could.

The term Napus delighted them, and the female doctors made faces, mimicking the infantile appellation and the fateful phrase: “a grand pé a pati, n’a pus.” There was talk of a further event of the same order, which had occurred in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and had “blown away” a foreman at a furniture factory, as well as an epidemic of threes cases in Marseilles affecting a family of Greek cockle-fishers. We were well-read people, Polyplasts for the most part, and hypotheses were being produced in abundance.

“It’s the beginning of the end of the world,” asserted my cousin 17,178, knowing nothing about it. He was the product of a mixture of Germanism and mysticism that had caused him to be baptized Görres, the name of a celebrated turner of German heads.2 He claimed that the affair had been predicted by a Moldavian monk in the twelfth century and that Nostradamus had made allusion to it in a centurie:3

When the seventh, preceded by a double third,

Will have broken the Ardent of august Sex

And powder expends with nothing found outside.

“The first line,” my cousin affirmed, signifies 2227, the number two being repeated three times. The “august Sex” signifies the little girl, whose courage—the Ardent—was broken by the sudden pulverization of her grandfather, who disappeared without leaving a trace.”

My lovely laboratory assistant Henriette Tastepain, however, who had discovered a new magnetic center in the cell, remarked that the lines of the famous centuries were contrived in such a way that one could always find meat and drink therein.

At that moment, Polyplast 14,026 arrived—the issue of a series of alternating Franco-American and Franco-Hungarian interbreedings crossed with negro, whose physiognomy is like a mosaic of those various nationalities. His erudition is extraordinary. He knows almost all the languages spoken on the planet, the majority of mathematical and biological sciences, and can cite, in bibliographical matters, the abstracts of all the periodicals that have appeared in France, Italy, England and Germany in the last ten years. The little fellow, who is also sensitive and even passionate, is an ambulant index. We asked him what he thought the explanation of the phenomenon might be. He reflected for ten minutes before answering, in the fashion of a prodigious calculator, and then his strong, cracked voice set forth the following:

“The disease, epidemic today, is, in my opinion, very ancient, having probably appeared in uncivilized countries and in a sporadic form. Complete disappearances that occurred before witnesses were recorded in Patagonia a hundred years ago. There have been others more recently in New Guinea. In the deserted part of Ireland, where the uninterrupted civil war has only left a few buildings standing, an observation mistaken for a legend—which is quite frequent—has established the sudden and total disappearance, about thirty years ago, of three members of the same family. I believe I remember, though, that Marco Polo, in his account of his journey to China, had already.…”

The laboratory door opened to admit my Lyonnais laboratory technician Mouillemouillard, who has the face and accent of Chignol,4 minus the “sarsifie.” He was both alarmed and terrified.

“The hourly wireless broadcast has announced that two other people have just disappeared from the Rue de Rivoli, while they were trying on shoes in a store. The young woman who was assisting them with the shoehorn is half-mad.”

We burst out laughing—which finished widening Moulemouillard’s pale gray eyes. The bizarrerie of the Napus, in the early hours, simultaneously excited an easily comprehensive fear and a kind of bizarre rictus, which must have been that of our earliest ancestors before the invention of fire or the appearance of the mammoth. In addition, scientific curiosity mingled with it. Stuffed with theories to the point of nausea, it was a veritable feast for us to get hold of a raw, undeniable and patent phenomenon. That is why amusement was associated in our souls with anguish.

Although it carried people off without any warning and sometimes prematurely, aphanasia at least offered the advantage of avoiding the formalities and embarrassments created by bodies, and, as Bossuet put it, “unfortunate residues.” With that, no more coffins, no more funeral processions, no more cemeteries. It had no deleterious effect on religious beliefs—on the contrary, in fact: corporeal disappearance could be considered as the acme of spiritualism, giving free range to all certainties of a mystical order, which are in any case the least unsteady. It reinforces the belief in the miraculous that inhabits even the most materialistic among us, if they care to reflect that everything down here is miraculous, beginning with the fact of their existence.

“Messieurs,” said Professor Ailette, “there is no doubt that, in the general disarray procured by the appearance of a new plague—for doubt in that regard is, alas, no longer possible—the public will turn to us and demand explanations. Let us therefore get to work and seek the cause, or the causes. Then we can think about the means of combating it. At first glance, however, it doesn’t seem very convenient.”

The general hilarity was increased by this speech, officious in appearance and in conformity with the specialty of Professor Ailette, who has a dry tone, small, pale and hairy features, and a mania for holding forth endlessly about any subject whatsoever, and making speeches over any tomb whatsoever. Everyone was thinking that the Napus would cut off his speech at source and deprive it of its ritual and preferred exercise. In any case, on what could we base research into the cause, or the causes, of a destruction followed by the scattering of being in the ether?

The terrible plague brought us all, ignorant and knowledgeable alike, back to the “subjection without understanding” that likens human and terrestrial discipline to the strictest military discipline. That was what Professor Sidoine, a brown-haired giant, stolid and hirsute, expressed very aptly:

“My dear Ailette, I’d like nothing better than to work, with you and our colleagues in the Aristotle Foundation, to combat this frightful disease. It is, however, still necessary for me observe a case with my own eyes—for after all, it might be a myth, or a illusion on the part of our eminent comrade Polyplast 17,117, or a communal hallucination propagated by the press and the wireless.

“Remember, in fact, that a little more than three centuries ago, one of our most illustrious predecessors, Professor Charcot—who flourished, its true, on the crumbling soil and in the unsteady light of democracy—described and named a non-existent disease, hysteria, of which no specimen has ever been seen since, in three hundred years. I have in my library, however, works—which have become rare after a long period of oblivion—in which women are observed twisted into all sorts of attitudes by that implausible and improbable malady. Professor Charcot was certainly neither a visionary nor a liar. He believed that he had seen what he described. He had projected a phantom, a mirage.”

Thus put on the spot, I reiterated the account of the grandfather and the little girl, the testimony of the persons present, the new cases reported in the newspapers. I added that I had not put into it any kind of authorial or journalistic distortion; that it was possible that I had participated in a mass hallucination, of the sort created by the famous and imaginary trick of the fakir who caused a rope to stand up and then climbs it; I proposed that we wait, that we allow ourselves to be guided by events—advice which, although being only timidity, generally passes for wisdom.

We separated on those good resolutions—but I was certain that we would come together again before long, and that the malicious demon of aphanasia would not rest there.

Indeed, forty-eight hours after Sidoine’s exceedingly reasonable observations, as if by a sort of irony, it was at the Aristotle Foundation itself that a further disappearance by Napus occurred, in circumstances that would not have left St. Thomas himself any room for doubt.

One of the luminaries of our establishment, who had contributed a great deal, fifteen years before to the since-overtaken theory of cyton, was Madame Grégeois, the divorcee of the late Professor Grégeois precisely because of their disagreements on the subject of the magnetic centers of the cell. The husband claimed that they were two in number, the wife that they were three, neither having anticipated the fourth center discovered by the lovely Tastepain. Madame Grégeois was ugly, shrewish, peremptory and interfering, and had been decorated with every possible award of every nation of the inhabited earth, which formed an impressive multicolored display on her semi-masculine costume at official receptions. She detested Tastepain, of course, not only because of the cyton but also because of her charming physique.

Now, the supreme council of the Aristotle Foundation having met urgently, we—a few Polyplasts, Professor Ailette, Grégeois-la-Grège,5 as we called her in jest, and half a dozen other leading lights—were in Sidoine’s laboratory. The harpy was in the process of expounding her opinion on the probable origin of the Napus, which was attributable, according to her, to the spots of Jupiter acting of their own accord on sunspots and rendering them cytocidal, fatal to human cells. Suddenly, the little dry click that had remained in my ears since the old man of the Champs-Élysées was heard, and nothing more remained of Grégeois-la-Grège than the memory of her slanders, her ugliness and her genius.

The professors went as pale as effigies of fresh plaster. We Polyplasts, of harder composite formation, had difficulty holding back the convulsive laughter I mentioned before. Ailette was already twitching his goatee under the triple bony projections of his cheekbones and forehead, commencing the funeral oration of our vanished colleague. The habit he had of making speeches over graves and commemorative monuments caused him to dive right in, listing in his wooden voice the merits and achievements of the unfortunate Grégeois, thus returned to the impalpable ether after having sustained the cause of the triple magnetic center of the cell all her life. He even went so far as to classify the annihilated—“our great annihilated”—among the scientific martyrs of the twenty-third century, which was exaggerated. A pickpocket, a doorman or an ambulant seller of chestnuts or dates could just as easily be subject to the Napus as the King of France or the President of the Britannic Republic.

I ought to add, in order to maintain the historical veridity that is the greatest attraction of memoirs, that the disappearance of that Megaera of the laboratory caused general delight at the Foundation. Mouillemouillard, whom she harassed and even slapped on occasion, if he had mislaid a retort, trembled with joy. He never ceased repeating: “What a blessing, Lord Jesus, what a stroke of luck, damn it!” As for Henriette Tastepain, she could hardly believe in such good fortune, and it was necessary to show her, through a doorway, the grave and contorted face of Ailette the speech-maker to convince her of the napusification of her enemy.

The news media and technical press generally lag behind, the former by ten years and the latter by ten months, with regard to the true status and scientific value of personalities who die, with or without leaving mortal remains. Thus, fifty years after the microbial doctrine had been abandoned by the institutes, the Academicians and even the Universities of America and France—the two nations most attached to their scientific fetishes—and the great dailies contained to entertain their readers with the bacilli of typhoid, tuberculosis and syphilis, and other phantoms and fancies of a similar stripe. For a week, the concept of cyton and its derivatives alimented the necrology of the “excellent Grégeois,” universally missed and mourned, especially in the glorious establishment where she and her illustrious husband “had brought it to the perfection in which it is seen today.”

These well-informed publications were sure that the study of the new plague would be taken to the extreme by the scientific personnel of the foundation, and that it would be mastered before long. It was decided that a national subscription would be opened for the erection of a statue to the Grégeois household, so perfectly disunited, in the central courtyard of the dwelling that they had made to resound, for many years, with the din of their learned conjugal disputes.

In the following week, however, ten cases of Napus were duly observed in Paris and its suburbs, five in Lyon, twenty in Marseilles, seventeen in Lille and three in Nancy. It was thought that rural areas might be spared, until three aphanasias of classic form appeared in Nièvre, five in Brittany, and twenty-two—a frightful figure—in Auvergne, around Clermont-Ferrand and Brioude. At the same time, England, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Sweden appeared to be afflicted even more rudely, with figures whose mounting progression sent shivers down the back. The little dry click, the announcer of the disappearance, was perceived everywhere. Some witnesses of the fatal phenomenon thought they had perceived a smell of burning, similar to the one our distant ancestors attributed to the arrival and departure of the Devil.

Once the initial moment of stupor—and, for us Polyplasts, of merriment—had passed, a great activity was manifest in all the institutes, academies, universities and scientific foundations in the world, in the form of correspondence, communications, discussions and controversies regarding the origin of the unprecedented plague. Human intelligence, much more restricted than is generally affirmed, even in the most elevated and penetrating minds, has a tendency to imagine, for such a phenomenon, some unique cause, and only admits a multiplicity of cases with difficulty. The explanation of the damned Grégeois by reference to the Jovian spots left the world along with its enunciator, but the following theses were successively envisaged:

Firstly, the liberation of an unknown force, which enthusiasts for the defunct cyton did not fail to suppose to be the issue of the human cell itself, in certain atmospheric and meteorological conditions as yet unsuspected. Professor Ailette rallied to this supposition and devoted a three-hundred-page volume to it, with diagrams, which he naturally had one of his pupils write, who delegated it himself to a laboratory assistant—hence the extremely vague character of the work, which was immediately crowned by the Académie des Sciences and rewarded with a prize of fifty thousand francs, of which the laboratory assistant received a hundred, the pupil five hundred and Ailette the rest. He had considerable expenses to meet, maintaining, in spite of his advanced age and being as ugly as sin, a nineteen-year-old dancer.

Secondly, partial electrical discharges, veritable lightning-bolts of prodigious amplitude, due to the abuse of waves of every sort, which are running around the planet in all directions at all hours of the day and night. Professor Sidoine became the champion of this ingenious, even plausible idea, to which he soon attributed a character of certainty and evidence such that he flew into a rage if the slightest doubt were emitted on the subject of what he called his “doctrine.” The aforesaid doctrine was soon to have terrible consequences, in the form of clashes between the nations of Europe, America, Africa, and Australia, which had reached different levels of electrical sophistication and exploitation.

Thirdly, a slow and clandestine wastage of the tissues—a cancer without cancer—provoked and accelerated by certain violent hereditary images accumulated over several generations. This hypothesis, due to Professor Eustache, was itself divided into two sub-hypotheses, one envisaging only the toxicity of internal images, the other bringing into consideration the diffusion of “cinetexts,” or books with moving images.

Fourthly, the formation, because of overly frequent ethnic interbreeding and excessive naturalizations, of a race with tissues in unstable and, so to speak, ephemeral equilibrium. The adherents of this final explanation unleashed violent anger in the camp of the Polyplasts, to which I belonged, and almost provoked civil war by virtue of the epidemic character generally attributed to the Napus. I did not participate in these vain furies.

Soon, the rumor having circulated, falsely, that the Aristotle Foundation had discovered, as a consequence of explanation number two—the Sidoine thesis—an electrical vaccination against the Napus, a host of people from all walks of life presented themselves at the doors of our establishment, begging us to immunize them. It was no banal spectacle, the sight of all those panic-stricken individuals forming a queue for hours on end as if at the door of a bakery in a besieged town, only to hear that the news was premature and that several “preservatives”—that was the term of choice—were being studied but that nothing definite had yet been determined. The meager and minimal reserves of pity and charity subsisting among the Polyplasts, other than our friend 14,026, were used up and exhausted by it.

Nothing is more amusing than experimenting on oneself with the distillation of the last drops of the charitable emotion that all humanity experienced after the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I firmly believe, for my part, after having analyzed myself very thoroughly, that the exclusive scientific development of the human mind ended in that extinction of the two sentiments that stimulated admirable works, today almost incomprehensible to Polyplasts and laboratory workers in general. Laughter, in us, has dried up the tears that once passed for a relief, for a veritable anesthetic.

The progression of cases of “death without remains” in Paris, the suburbs and the provinces ensured that the multitude of supplicants thus evinced was augmented in disquieting proportions, at the same time as apprehension rendered them noisy and stormy. The convened authorities addressed themselves to the Foundation and urged it to find some means of calming minds and preventing the anguish of the plague from degenerating into riots, like those already produced in America, England, Germany and Italy.

Sidoine offered the opinion that all high- and very-high-tension electrical installations, as well as all wireless communication, should be suspended over the entire extent of the nation’s territory, even at the cost of the greatest economic, financial and commercial disturbance. It was a big decision to take; the Crown and its Ministers demanded time to reflect, all the more indispensable as the question was international, and, by virtue of the conflict of interests subordinate to wealth in electricity and waves, risked provoking grave diplomatic complications.

Super! the Polyplasts immediately thought. There’s going to be a scientific war! Victory will go to whomever, having discovered the secret of the Napus, can apply it to military operations.

Spurred on by the Ministry of Hygiene and the promise of a signal decoration to be worn in the middle of the thorax, Professor Ailette, for his part, immediately fabricated a cellular, or cytoplastic, broth at three francs a gram, composed of the mesenteries of young pigs and the lymphatic ganglia of previously-ionized veal-calves, with three additional doses of ultra-violet light and two doses of electric eel phosphorescence. According to him, no one who had ingested the remedy would be any longer susceptible to the Napus. He was running no risk of failure, no proof being possible that anyone who died without remains had taken the antiaphanasic broth or not. There was an urgent debate in the Council of Ministers as to whether to make the mixture obligatory for everyone in France, but the same whimsy that had presided over the manufacture caused the legal project to be set aside.

Suitably watered by the budget for so-called beneficial publicity, the press made a remarkable fuss of the “Ailette brew,” and fifty thousand hundred-gram bottles of it were sold within a week, which generated a very tidy profit for the Foundation, for Ailette and for the dancer (who immediately bought a comfortable residence overlooking the location of the ancient Arc de Triomphe devoted to the battles of the First Empire). It was a fine example of the naivety of the public, in which no one made the perfectly simple reflection that it was a matter of sucker-bait, like the powder that prevented flies from laying eggs that was all the rage in the twenty-second century, if one can believes the chronicles of the epoch, or the concoction of dog-dung launched as a general antiseptic and elixir of longevity by the Russian scientist Metchnikoff in 1909 or thereabouts.6

The Americans have always done things excessively, with a sort of intellectual and economic gigantism, as if by contrast with their predecessors the Aztecs, a small race who minimized everything. It was soon evident that the explosion of the Napus was three times as powerful beyond the Atlantic than here, and that its progression there was geometric rather than arithmetic, as in Europe. Undoubtedly, though, there was some exaggeration in the claims.

The Asiatic Napus, notably in Chins and Indochina, was accompanied by a dull thud, which was thought to come from the ground, and left a rather odorous residue, comparable to a piece of the sole of a foot shriveled into three lobes, somewhat reminiscent of a human doll. We asked for specimens, but the coolies on land and sea refused to handle them, claiming that one could catch the Napus by contact with them.

That etymological persistence of the term “Napus” through languages very distant from one another demonstrates the degree of terror and mental anxiety attached to the plague, such that people clung superstitiously to its initial denomination. The Chinese ideogram created with that intention, which the Japanese copied, represented it by a grid composed of three vertical strokes on the right. Introduced to a manuscript or a prayer-wheel, it was equivalent to the doubt arising from the sudden extinction of the personality, without one knowing into which part of the invisible the Dragon has carried it and hidden it. Commercial travelers in the Far East let it be known that the Sons of Heaven, to protect themselves, were chewing the sole-shaped residues, after having crushed them into a sort of disgusting powder.

That means was no more ridiculous or arbitrary than Ailette’s brew, but the members of the Aristotle Foundation were thrown into great perplexity by the fact that there now existed two forms of the Napus, one total, the other with a residue or relic. Electromagneto-radiant installations being less numerous in China and Asia than in Europe and America, Sidoine’s theory acquired a certain prestige thereby, which did not take long to complicate affairs.

With the blissful or artificial optimism characteristic of the ignorant, the most widely-circulated newspapers, which are the ones that provide the most inaccurate news—for the masses abhor truth as nature abhors a vacuum—had started out by declaring that the disease would not be generalized. On the contrary, it would become a rarity, or, at least, a temporary accident, due to obscure causes, and would disappear one day just as it had arrived. Far from taking that course, however, the Napus soon appeared as a new and unexpected catastrophe, firmly-established, which, threatening bodies to the extent of annihilating them, resounded in all the domains of the intellect.

It is true that ordinary death, death “with remains,” lies in wait for everyone from birth onwards, and all poets, preachers, and philosophers have embroidered beautiful and sometimes grandiose variations on that theme—but the threat of the new death, the death without remains, appeared to be something more redoubtable and more atrocious, in that it disturbed entrenched habits and extended depopulation even to the cemeteries. It was called the “blank epidemic,” and also the “empty epidemic.” In all the dailies, the necrological section was doubled in size, and necrology, properly speaking, became napusology. For example, one could read in the Vingt-troisième Siècle, in Le Figaro, and in Action Française—which had become, by force of circumstance, the official newspaper of the monarchy—news of this sort:

The Disease (with a capital D, because after two months one did not even say Napus any longer) has claimed another victim in the person of Monsieur d’Estampille, former Undersecretary of State for Finance, who disappeared yesterday at five p.m. at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and the Place de Rohan, in his fifty-fifth year. God has his soul! The commemorative service will be held at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule next Tuesday at ten a.m.

Or:

We record with regret the decease by the Disease of Mademoiselle Mahaufret (Élodie), disappeared in her property at Étampes, Les Clochettes, on Saturday the 14th at 3 p.m. God has her soul! The religious service will be held, etc.…

Or even:

It is with veritable dolor that we learn of the total disappearance of Professor Chestenèfre (Adhémar), which occurred during his lecture at the École de Médecine on Thursday last, in the large amphitheater at five p.m. The laic Astonishment will be held tomorrow, Saturday, in the courtyard of the Écoles in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince at noon. No flowers or wreaths.

The ceremony of “laic Astonishment” consisted of a sort of punch of honor dedicated to the memory of the deceased, in the course of which each member of the audience raised his eyes to the President of the Astonished and made the sign of the amazement caused by the sudden annihilation. I had the opportunity to be present at the Astonishment of that brute Chentenèfre, one of the last representatives of the scientific materialism of yore, in company with my cousin Polyplast 17,178, and I cannot describe the state of hilarity into which that baroque ceremony plunged us.

Some people boldly declared that, of the two faces of Death, they preferred the neater one, the one that boldly gave the lie to the celebrated axiom that “nothing is destroyed, nothing is created”—but the majority stubbornly refrained, out of superstition even from pronouncing the word “Napus,” and changed the subject if the topic arose in conversation.

The Disease, which had begun by striking old men or adults, went on from there quite rapidly to adolescents, notably of the female sex, and then to children, even nurslings, which suddenly disappeared from their mothers’ arms, leaving the breast bare. It seemed that the plague was thus re-climbing the slope of life from bottom to top. It was also remarked that it preferentially attacked perfectly healthy individuals, although that was not an absolute rule. Lunatics, ataxics, the tubercular and the syphilitic were in the front line in the statistics of hospitals and the private clientele.

As a member of the Aristotle Foundation I easily acquired from the municipal council the placement of a marble plaque at the location of the first case of the Napus officially recorded, with the date 3 May 2227. It was a historic and scientific souvenir of the first order. When it came to the inauguration of the plaque the following July, however, there was a superstitious retreat. I solicited, successively, the Ministries, the Constitutional Bodies, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie Française and the Académie de Médecine, but in vain. Everyone found a pretext to refuse me his collaboration, and I foresaw the moment when I would have to conduct the ceremony on my own, with the groundskeeper and the man with the lifting-tackle. At the last moment, however, a few highly-placed individuals, fearful of ridicule, changed their minds, including an immortal by the name of Bachelard, who had written a small treatise on the metaphysical significance of “the Disease.” A podium had been set up on the very place where the little girl had pronounced the famous phrase: “a grand pé a pati, n’a pus.” I had ordered a brass band, which was to play one of those military marches of which we Polyplasts are so fond.

Then something implausible happened: at the moment when Bachelard, dressed in green like a giant frog, unfolded his notes and opened his mouth to begin his speech, a dry click was heard…and the Academician disappeared.

“Impossible to show more tact,” said the lovely Tastepain, who had lost a fiancé the same way a few months earlier. The discovery of a fifth magnetic center in the cell had rapidly consoled her.

I like Catholic Theology a lot. It is the only science that does not vary and its centuries-old subtlety puts to shame the sketchiness of the other research to which our intelligence has devoted itself. The rumor went around that the appearance of the Disease, which no mystic had foreseen, disconcerted the austere and religious scientists who had saved—once again—humanism and civilization two hundred years before. Not trusting the rumor-mongers, who are the dust, and then the mud, of life in society, I resolved to clarify the matter.

I went to see Père Estève in his convent at Richefort in the Cévennes. The great Benedictine received me with his customary generosity and affability. He knew nothing about the Napus except what he had read in the newspapers. None of his monks had disappeared—but had such an event occurred, it would not have caused him any more emotion than a death with remains.

“Death, my dear boy, is still death, and if Providence has decided that this new form of cessation of life should exist, it’s evidently for our greater good.”

“But Father, one can be surprised by the Napus outside of a state of contrition.”

“It’s the same with any kind of sudden death. As for the absence of remains, that might either be an artifice of the Demon or a privilege of Providence, and it won’t be long before theologians and synods can issue a reasoned opinion on that delicate point. But tell me what effect this unexpected event is producing on the Century, and how it is being taken and accepted by the frivolous and by scientists?”

I told him what I knew. Père Estève did not know the origin of the word “Napus.” He laughed wholeheartedly on learning it, and made the remark that once again, an innocent child had been the first witness of the prodigy. “For it is indeed a prodigy, which might lead to extraordinary changes. I can’t remember any similar upheaval of ideas or habits. But tell me, my boy, what impression you felt before that extraordinary annihilation, comparable to the extinction of a fire?”

I was obliged to confess that the impression had been primarily comical, and that the majority of Polyplasts had reacted and were reacting to the Napus in the same way. The issue of successive interbreedings, and destined, in the ideas of the legislators, to propagate the ideas of peace and humanism through our shaky societies of the twenty-third century, our reaction had been the inverse of the one expected of us. The complexity of our temperaments had given one of them—the national—sway over the others, and reinforced the warrior instinct. Under the cover of pure science, we were dreaming of domination and battles, and that psychological inclination combined with the economic and industrial inclination that pushes ever harder for the intensive manufacture of improved arms, gases, heavy artillery, electrical weapons, and so on.

While I was speaking, Père Estève shook his head, doubtless ruminating the words of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.…”

2. Joseph Görres (1776-1848) was a leading member of the German Romantic Movement whose activities as a journalist made him a leading critic of Napoléon, who thought his Der Rheinische Merkur a particularly significant ideological enemy. He also became a significant Catholic mystic, publishing a five-volume account of Christliche Mystik between 1836 and 1842.

3. The prophetic quatrains published by Nostradamus in 1555 and divided into ten “centuries” were greatly elaborated after his death, although most fakes did at least observe the four-line format that is neglected here. In the same way, the most famous set of prophecies credited—falsely—to a twelfth-century monk were attributed to the Irish Saint Malachy, not to a “Moldavian” (Moldavia had not yet come into existence at that time), so Daudet appears to be deliberately playing up the falsity of the entire prophetic tradition.

4. Various characters of this name featured in French literature trace their origin back to one of the stock figures of the Théâtre du Guignol de Lyon, a marionette theater related ancestrally to the Italian commedia dell’arte and in terms of its descendants to British “Punch and Judy” shows. The word “sarsifie,” approximately equivalent to the English slang term “sauce” [pugnacious impertinence] was invented to describe the particular character of his irreverence.

5. Grégeois-la-Grège translates as “raw Greek fire.”

6. Élie Metchnikoff was a leading researcher at the Institut Pasteur, who received the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his studies of the immune system and the activity of phagocytes. The scornfully sarcastic reference is presumably to his commercial promotion of an ointment of calomel (mercury chloride) as a prophylactic against syphilis. The use of mercury to treat syphilis—which, if it ever worked at all, was severely undermined in its utility by horrid side-effects—fell into disuse after the discovery of better antibacterial treatments, eventually capped by antibiotics.