The Blue Peril

by Maurice Renard

  “During the car journey, Mademoiselle Le Tellier was forced to dress in the costume of the ‘disenchanted,’ and beneath the black veil that covers their faces, which is called a burkha, she was tightly gagged. How did they get her into the reserved carriages at Lyon-Perrache station? Skillfully, for sure. A fifteen minute stop, the crowds, the confusion augmented by that troop of fezzes, turbans and burkhas coming along the platform, public curiosity, the evening twilight and the fog…with all that, I, who was in charge of the police escort, saw nothing but the smokescreen. Anyway, I was only thinking about protecting the Turk from thieves, and not about protecting others against him! All was in order, wasn’t it? Twelve veiled women embarked, twelve veiled women disembarked…that would have been the count, if I’d taken it into my head to count them…

  “In Marseille, I did observe that one of the women was making efforts to remain; two others were holding her. But what about it? It was an inviolable matter, no concern of mine! We were in a hurry, moreover, to get that inconvenient individual embarked.

  “The steamer raised anchor, and I returned to Paris, to have the honor of making your acquaintance, Monsieur le Duc.”

  “Very good,” said the latter, “but out there in Turkey, Mademoiselle Le Tellier…and on the ship, Garan, on the ship!”

  “Out there, shielded from view in the impenetrable harem, as in the cabins of the ship, she was unable to say anything or to do anything. But it’s here that she had a stroke of luck—an unexpected stroke of luck! Abdul Kadir, worn out by alcohol and depravity, was already ailing on his departure. The Mediterranean put him in no state to do any harm to anyone, of any kind, and he arrived in Constantinople seriously ill. Afterwards, he got gradually worse, and never left his sick-bed again—which became his deathbed yesterday. Mademoiselle Le Tellier had not even caught a glimpse of him during her entire imprisonment.

  “Meanwhile, Abdul Kadir has snapped his hookah, if you’ll excuse the expression, and here come his nephews and heirs to invade the old palace in Stamboul, spilling into the harem and finding, in the midst of all the Fatimas and feridjees—guess who? Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse Le Tellier, a trifle pale, in the process of looking at the sky through the holes in a moucharaby—is that what they call it? Young Turks brought up in the European manner, speaking French fluently, they had her taken out with a thousand and one salaam aleikums and a thousand and two excuses. And on the threshold of the palace, who should she meet but…?”

  “Tiburce! Go on!”

  “Yes, Monsieur le Duc, Monsieur Tiburce! Come from Ankara and on the point of leaving for Marseille, he was sadly visiting the Stamboul quarter and admiring the faïences on the gateway with a cavernous eye!”

  “So,” Monsieur d’Agnès remarked, laughing—he was laughing at everything—“Tiburce has gone almost all the way around the world to discover the person he was searching for! He went in a direction directly opposite to the right one! He reached Constantinople all the same, without knowing that that was where he had to go. Ineffable hazard! Ineffable Tiburce!”

  “He’s made the grand tour, that’s all!” said Mademoiselle d’Agnès, indulgently.

  “You see,” declared the inspector, with facetious gravity, “that Sherlockism has merit!”

  “I have to send a telegram to Mirastel right away!” Monsieur d’Agnès went to his desk.

  “If you wish, Monsieur le Duc—although Monsieur Tiburce has undoubtedly already done so, on in his own initiative. But you won’t say a word about Abdul Kadir, will you? The Commander of Believers implores you, with my voice.”

  “All right. Since Mademoiselle Le Tellier has escaped from the misadventure unscathed, we shan’t say anything about Abdul Kadir.”

  The inspector rolled his large eyes and said, in a whisper: “The Sultan, Monsieur le Duc, is offering 500,000 francs for a promise of silence.”

  “What!” said the Duc, in an irritated tone—but he calmed down all of a sudden. “Five hundred thousand francs? Well, that’s all right too. The disaster victims of Bugey will be grateful to receive them—and I’ll add another 500,00 more, to make a round figure. Only I’m the one who’ll distribute the million, without any distribution committee, you understand, Garan? Tell that to the Sultan of the Turks and the Sultan of the French!”

  “You’re an admirable man, Monsieur le Duc!”

  “That’s not all, Garan. I certainly intend, for my part, to say nothing about Abdul Kadir, but I intend that the State should take the initiative, tomorrow, in a national subscription for the erection of a statue of Monsieur Robert Collin, whose intelligence, courage and sacrifice have set us such a fine example in unveiling the secret of the invisible world.”

  “Bravo!” exclaimed Mademoiselle d’Agnès.

  “You’re right, Monsieur le Duc.”

  There was a pause.

  “And to think,” the inspector resumed, in an emotional voice, “that poor Monsieur Collin was only sustained up there, in the aerium…by blonde hair and a grey dress…which were not those of Mademoiselle…Oh, pardon me, Monsieur le Duc!”

  “Grey dresses have played an important role in this affair,” said Mademoiselle d’Agnès. “It was also a grey dress that led the innkeeper at Virieu-le-Petit to confuse Marie-Thérèse with her cousin Suzanne. Do you see how it happened, François?”

  “I see it all. On the day of the abduction, Marie-Thérèse left Mirastel at about 10 a.m. It was, therefore, at about 10 a.m. that she was abducted by the pasha’s followers. In the meantime, Henri and Fabienne were climbing the Colombier. They’d organized a secret meeting with the unfortunate Suzanne. Do you recall, Garan, the letter from her that Henri went to fetch from the poste restante on the eve of May 4? Suzanne, therefore, had come on the train from Belley, and was to take the local train to meet her brother at Don at about ten-fifteen. They did, indeed, meet up, and the three of them continued climbing. The innkeeper at Virieu, who recognized Henri, only saw the two women from behind, without paying much attention to them. She did, however, notice that the grey dress was a town dress, not a tourist’s dress. It’s probable that Suzanne Monbardeau had no intention of letting herself be dragged very far up the mountain, but the opportunity—so rare—of a nice family outing… and that’s everything.”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything.”

  Speaking to his sister, Monsieur d’Agnès concluded: “Which doesn’t affect the fact, my Jeanneton, that Tiburce has won you fair and square, since he’s found Marie-Thérèse!”

  Which Mademoiselle Jeanne completed by adding: “He’s won me, above all, by regaining his sanity!”

  In Monsieur Le Tellier’s dossier, the four telegrams mentioned in the present chapter are items 1040, 1041, 1042 and 1043.

  Items 1044 and 1045 are invitations to two marriages celebrated on the same day, one of the Duc d’Agnès to Marie-Thérèse Le Tellier, the other of Tiburce to Jeanne d’Agnès.

  Item 1046 is the rough draft of a letter sent by Monsieur Maxime Le Tellier to the Prince of Monaco. The former naval officer begs His Highness to accept his resignation as an employee of the Museum and a member of oceanographic expeditions, for the reason that, having been fished himself, put in a sort of aquarium and lowered down on the end of a line as a piece of bait, he would experience an indomitable repugnance in subjecting others to the fate to which he was subjected by the sarvants.

  “I do not deny,” he writes, “the importance that such research has with respect to humankind, and I wish Your Highness’s dedicated work every success, but for my own part, I am incapable henceforth of taking any part in it.”

  And it is with that final item in the dossier that it would be necessary to bring our popular history of the year 1912 A.D. to an end, if we had not omitted, voluntarily, to mention a report that ought, according to its number, to be placed between the testimony relating to the disappearance of the aeroscaph and Tiburce’s letter from Ankara, and which it is necessary to mention now.

  This document
…

  Epilogue

  …Is the list of the molds of the aeroscaph.

  As everyone knows, they were taken to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, along with the photographs of the aeroscaph appearing thanks to arnoldine. They can be visited every day of the week, except Mondays. In the material order, they are all that remains of the sarvants’ first incursion into our territory.

  Few people go to look at them, and some persist in seeing them simply as the vestiges of an enormous hoax. The terror was so great that they are glad to forget it, to believe that it was irrational and that it will never return. The year 1912 A.D. seemed unforgettable while it was in progress; once it had elapsed, people did not even want to remember it. The prayers of believers rise once more into Heavens where nothing any longer exists, since nothing is perceptible. In France especially, people are pleased to maintain that there has only even been one Blue Peril: the Prussian Blue Peril. Bugey does not like to think that its limits coincide with the superaerian littoral; in a few months, it will contest the fact.

  Truly, if the former Minister of War, now a mere deputé again, did not brave the Chamber’s mockery by terminating all of his speeches with the Catoesque60 declaration, “The sarvants must be destroyed!”—if the unfortunates escapees were not here to tell the story of their martyrdom; if the memory of the Blue Peril did not resonate tunefully in the magazines; if Monsieur Fursy had not composed an immortal “chanson rosse” in which the respectable is no more than “un p’tit bou d’Ain” (a petit boudin—that’s rich, all the same!)61—one might imagine that we had dreamed that nightmare, or, at least, in accordance with a vulgar expression singularly appropriate to the circumstance, that for half a year, people had had “spiders in the ceiling.”62

  That is the kind of scatterbrains we are. Our thoughtlessness is no excuse. We only think about rising river levels when the flood-water surrounds us.

  Certainly, there is anxiety regarding sarvants; work is being done to ward off new attacks, but indolently, and there is less and less of it, the risk having ceased to spur us on with the stimulant of its presence.

  It must be said too, that if the sarvants were to return, they would find wiser adversaries—not braver, but more resigned. For, disturbingly, people had begun to get used to the abductions, to those disappearances whose bizarrerie was eroded by their frequency, to that increasingly familiar scourge which, after all, sacrificed far fewer victims than microbes, which are similarly invisible, albeit in a different manner. Fewer victims than the least bacterium! Fewer victims, too, than disastrous war or alcoholism, those exceedingly murderous epidemics which we nevertheless unleash at will (have not the plague and cholera been put at the disposal of human beings?) Assuming that these abductions were to be multiplied indefinitely, they would become for us an endemic affliction of Bugists, or even of human beings, and we would finish up accepting them, as an individual accustoms himself to a chronic illness.

  Some such inertia, some such cowardly and vague resignation, is the reason why the peoples of the globe have not nobly confederated a United States of the World, in order to resist the common enemy, the Invisible—as sublime dreamers might have hoped.

  In our eyes, in spite of everything, the sarvants have remained fishers of individual men, although they are in truth the assailants of humanity. That insupportable idea has been driven back into the darkness of times to come, but one day, these beings who share with us the empire of the Earth might take it into their heads to enslave us, or even to exterminate us, just as we might one day occupy the ocean bed. They might surge forth again, effect a descent, and say to us: “How about a 50-50 split!”

  A half-share? Only a half? That’s modest. What do we know? This adventure has allowed us to glimpse the immensity of what is unknown to us. After this, it would be a grave and puerile mistake to limit our world to the world of sarvants, which is really only the most recent of our discoveries, and not the final step of our science. A half-share? What if it were a third, a fourth, a fifth or a sixth?

  We do not know much more about the ocean depths than the atmospheric heights. Perhaps there are social creatures in the Pacific, at the bottom of the Tuscarora Deep, which is 8500 meters deep, or the Caroline Trench,63 which extends to 9636 meters: malicious crustaceans, unable to scale the submarine mountains, whose centuries-old dream is to rise up through their dense altitude toward the secret of the culminating waters. One fine evening—who knows?—an incredible machine might emerge from the sea: a boat that ought to be called a balloon, laden with monsters, suspended from some enormous bubble filled with artificial air fabricated in profundis as we fabricate the hydrogen of our aerostats, wrapped in a network of silk woven from unknown seaweeds. That ascent of crabs, future invaders of our shores, would be the counterpart of the descent of the invisible spiders, reaching us in a pocket of void. Perhaps their aquatic realm is strewn with prodigious curiosities. I can imagine strange lakes of enigmatic fluids heavier than mercury, stagnating as our dormant ponds do at the bottom of the air, and as somnolent air does at the bottom of the void, and I can imagine these abyssal lakes populated by moving animals, which the fish call “fish.”

  Let no one protest! Our scientists know less about the fauna of the ocean depths than about those of geological periods. We still do not know whether the giant reptiles of bygone eras might still be living in the murky depths, and whether the great sea serpent might be the ancient plesiosaur. In fact, the aerial precipice, the marine basin and the compact gulf of the soil are equally unknown to us. No physicist is in a position to affirm that the terrestrial crust does not allow the passage of certain solar radiations, dark and cold, whose action is sufficient to sustain the life of subterranean races, in the same way that the pellicle of superaerian continents does not intercept any of the warm and luminous radiations that sustain the activity of nature on the surface of the Earth.

  Then again, perhaps the middle of the ball contains populations that have no need of the Sun to exist. One can easily imagine all these superimposed creations around the same center…and nothing prevents us from arguing that the world of the sarvants is not the most exterior of these concentric spheres, since it is only at the surface of the first atmospheric layer and there is a second. Perhaps there is a second invisible universe, a supreme Earth of Jovian dimensions, at the surface of the latter, between the relative void and the absolute ether…

  Thus, we might imagine our planet composed of a sequence of globes, one within the other, but nevertheless isolated and without intermondial exchanges, each with its inhabitants, animals and plants. It would resemble Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, whose circles enclose circles. Would it, then, be a great stupidity to develop that parallel? Considering the torments of our days, calmed by pleasures so paltry and so brief, is one not tempted sometimes to doubt that our life really is life? Could we not believe, effortlessly, that our real existence has been accomplished, that we are all dead, and that the space that we see, in the form of glabrous and morose bipeds, is merely a purgatory: a median circle, a sphere in the midst of others, in which we are expiating, in a state of mediocre suffering, the venial sins of an anterior life? Might one not go so far as to claim that sarvant existence was our initial condition, and that their descent constituted a descent into Hell? But that hypothesis carries a strong stain of metempsychosis, and we must revert to the innocent agitation of more fertile lessons.64

  Oh! I have not made allusion to one fine example of generosity that the sarvants have given us. It is too obvious.

  Their invisibility also reveals to us that, without seeking populations 50 kilometers up in the air or 50 kilometers down in the depths, we might conjecture as to the presence of invisible and intangible creatures in the very midst of humankind. The might be molded in gas or formed of X-rays, as we are made of carnal substance. Our restricted senses might be unable to perceive the slightest sign of them.65 The souls of these subtle beings would have some imponderable matter for support—which
is, I think, more acceptable to reason than belief in a soul without any support, which is, however, admitted by all the partisans of eternal life, who are legion among intelligent men. These ungraspable individuals might perhaps inhabit our surface and live here without our knowing it. Perhaps they do not suspect our existence and more than we suspect theirs. Perhaps they pass through us and we pass through them as we walk; perhaps their cities and ours overlap; perhaps our deserts are full of their crowds and our silences of their cries…

  But perhaps we are their unconscious slaves. In that case, our unsuspectable masters are installed within us and direct us according to their whim. In that case, there is not a gesture of our hand that they have not desired us to perform, not a word from our mouth of which they are not the prompters. At that thought, the mind rises up in disgust…and yet it would be sufficient that these beings, invisible, intangible and all-powerful, combined their other monstrosities with that of being individual or collective at will, like the Sarvants, to unite merits that are revered everywhere, under other names: the sacred.

  Vital concurrence is, therefore, undoubtedly much greater than is presumed. That is what the discovery of the sarvants tells us, first and foremost—but that is not all.

  If we consider the adventure in a wider context, it teaches us a truth that it would be wise to remember—even if the Blue Peril were nothing but a fable, so prodigiously possible would that fable remain. It is that, at any moment, unexpected cataclysms of an analogous sort, might befall us, our children, or their descendants.