The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul

by Albert Robida

Pursued by starlight, Escoubico finally found a refuge. His persecutors, navajas in hand, scoured the entire city, Alhambra and all, but they could not discover his retreat. Eacoubico had hidden in the Grenada museum, in the armor of Boabdil, the last Moorish king.

  Thanks to the connivance of the daughter of the keeper, who, touched by his fate, brought him nourishment in his armor, he was able to avoid all searches—but it was impossible for him to quit that uncomfortable shelter; the toreadors were on the lookout, and whether he liked it or not, he would have to live in it for an indefinite period.

  The Breton sailor Trabadec was the only one of our friends who was not in Europe. He wanted to remain on Asian territory, not to live there as a nabob in the bosom of luxury and the sweetest idleness, but rather to pursue a secret objective. As soon as he became a capitalist, he went to open a finance house in Burma.

  Trabadec was, therefore, a banker—or rather a money-lender—in Amarapura. Travel furnishes a young mind with a great deal of useless information; while passing through Amarapura in pursuit of the white elephant, Trabadec had learned a strange fact: in Burma, mortgage loans are unknown; only pawnbroking is customary; when a client borrows a sum of money, he gives his creditor a pledge of one or two of his wives.

  Trabadec, an honest Breton, had his idea; his millions would permit him to oblige a few upper-class Burmese. In accordance with custom, he accepted feminine guarantees, carefully chosen from among those his debitors were able to offer.

  His banking house soon acquired a colossal reputation; the ladies given as security were treated with an exquisite delicacy; instead of serving the creditor they had numerous eager servants at their disposal. It was rumored in high places that the Trabadec Bank and our friend were on the point of being commissioned to negotiate a large national loan in Paris on the usual Burmese conditions—which is to say, with a certain number of royal wives as security—which could not have failed to revolutionize the Bourse. One fine morning, however, the Burmese found the bank closed. Trabadec had put the key under the door and fled with the pledges!

  The injured Burmese made a great fuss; the affair made so much noise that the authorities had to intervene. The Burmese cavalry, launched in pursuit of the bankrupt, caught up with him at the frontier and brought him back to Amarapura in chains.

  Trabadec’s recklessness had put him in a bad position; his trial was about to begin and threatened to end badly for him if Farandoul, informed of his plight, could not find a way to get him out of Burmese custody by skill or by force.

  As you can see, our friends’ opulence had only served to get them into serious trouble; the other sailors, each granted three millions in the division of the reward received for the salvation of the white elephant, were all in more-or-less similar situations, some in prison for debt, others on the brink of ruination, a few on the run for different reasons. Even our brave Mandibul had got himself into an awkward situation. Having remained in Constantinople with Farandoul, he had launched into a tenebrous intrigue of a harem nature, and suddenly became impossible to find.

  Farandoul, gripped by the most powerful affections, had not hesitated. He had abandoned Turkey to its destiny in order to race to the aid of his unfortunate friends.

  First he had to find the vanished Mandibul, which was no small matter; finally, thanks to his energy and promptness, Farandoul had the pleasure of arriving just in time to pay off four scoundrels charged with throwing a tightly-stitched strong canvas sack, in which Mandibul and two ravishing odalisques were struggling, into the Bosphorus.

  One saved!

  On the same night, Farandoul, Mandibul and the two odalisques took passage on a French mailboat. The two odalisques disembarked at Smyrna, their native region; Farandoul and Mandibul continued as far as Naples, where they took it upon themselves to settle the difficulty of Seaman Bassol, retained in a hotel for the sum of eight francs, Bassol had lived life to the full; nothing remained of his three millions but memories and that small debt.

  From Naples the sailor and his saviors had set sail for Cartagena in Spanish territory. Escoubico had summoned them; he was beginning to get bored inside Boabdil’s armor and was very happy to see them arrive at the museum. Escoubico’s escape only required one day; while the toreadors persisted in blockading the Alhambra, the mariners took a railway train and set off for Madrid.

  Tournesol, his three friends and Farandoul’s foster-father were very surprised to see Farandoul arrive one morning in their town house in the Avenue de Friedland. Needless to say, Tournesol was expecting the bailiffs; the association’s millions had run out a week before, and the sumptuous house was besieged by creditors.

  The mariners had set up a number of buckets of water to greet the bearers of IOUs, and when the stern-faced Farandoul fell into the midst these preparations he almost received a cold shower.

  At the sight of his foster-father dressed as an eccentric dandy, Farandoul frowned. Tournesol hung his head in embarrassment, and within a minute, became aware of the villainous aspect of his conduct. We shall pass over the recriminatory scene that followed in silence. Farandoul, bitter at first, eventually calmed down and forgave them.

  By that evening, everyone was reconciled; Farandoul’s foster-father had renounced the Opera, the foyer and intimate suppers forever. He had burned an extensive collection of photographs and swept away the numerous souvenirs that cluttered up every corner of the house, along with empty champagne-bottles.

  Farandoul assembled the creditors and paid a few 100,000 francs to liquidate the situation. Mandibul had already left for London to obtain the prodigious Kirkson’s release from the debtors’ prison and to collect three or four other mariners scattered around London and Le Havre.

  They did not forget poor Trabadec; for a small fee, the Siamese mandarin Nao-Ching had been commissioned to get him out of Burma by diplomatic means and send him back to France.

  All went well. It was to be expected that within a matter of weeks, all the former sailors of the Belle Léocadie would be reunited again. Farandoul was already making grand plans. Understanding that everyday life could not be sufficient for men of that stripe, and that, for reasons of health, they required action, perils and great enterprises replete with excitement, he was firmly resolved to extract them from any danger of idleness to launch them once more on the high life of adventures!

  What had they not yet done, that they still might do? Formerly, when they had departed on their expeditions to America, their Oceanian journeys or their infernal white elephant hunt in Asia, they had been short of money and deprived of means of action. This time, however, Farandoul and Mandibul, still millionaires more than ten times over, were able to organize some magnificent expedition.

  Farandoul had already traced the plan of this magnificent expedition in his mind. Where would he lead his brave friends the mariners this time? What dangerous countries would they go off to confront? To what point of the globe would they take their energy and their courage?

  Where? Quite simply, to the NORTH POLE!

  The North Pole was about to cease to be unknown; that irritating geographical mystery was about to be brought into the light; Farandoul had sworn that he would reach it, through the redoubtable sheets of polar ice.

  II.

  The announcement of Farandoul’s expedition to the North Pole ran across the continent like a gunpowder train. Paris quivered; foreign correspondents telegraphed their newspapers. The news produced great emotion in German Academia, which trembled at the thought of our hero overtaking the Berlin Scientific Congress expedition in the search for the country of origin of the Latin-speaking seals in the polar regions.

  There was also a stir in London, for Farandoul received a letter just as he was beginning the work of organization. It read:

  North Pole Co. Ltd., London

  Lord Farandoul is hereby

  FORMALLY PROHIBITED

  from pursuing his expedition to the Pole.

  (illegible signature)

  Gove
rnor of the North Pole.

  Farandoul smiled disdainfully, threw the letter in the waste paper basket, and resumed his preparations without giving this fantastic governor any further thought. Thanks to his millions, generously spent, the project proceeded rapidly. The temporary workshops specially constructed for the expedition on the Esplanade des Invalides were busy day and night.

  The courtyard of the Tuileries, hired by Farandoul, had been put at the disposal of his men; it was above those celebrated ruins, you will remember, that in the exposition of 1878, the tethered balloon of Giffard and Tissandier104 accomplished its fine series of ascensions, taking hundreds of aspiring aeronauts 500 meters up into the sky. Soon, the imposing rump of an aerostat was seen rising above the blackened walls, by comparison with which the enormous balloon of yesteryear would have lost much of its majesty. Beneath this mastodon, in the workshops carefully screened from all gazes, Farandoul’s mariners were supervising the fabrication of all sorts of new engines, which completely overturned the ideas of a few scientists admitted to the enclosure.

  Farandoul, evidently, was far from making his expedition to the pole a purely maritime affair. Abandoning all received ideas, disdaining the routes mapped out by his forebears, Farandoul intended to reach the pole in a balloon—not, it is true, in a simple balloon with a modestly-sized gondola, an aerial vessel too fragile to confront the perils of polar regions, but in a solid balloon with a gondola-sloop invented for the occasion by our hero’s fertile mind.

  The future belongs to gondola-sloop balloons. Let us indicate, by means of a short description, the advantages of this mode of locomotion. The balloon itself only differs from familiar balloons in its proportions and a few minor details, but the gondola is quite simply a ship: an authentic ship, lightly but solidly constructed, covered with iron plates; a fully-equipped ship ready to take to sea at the shortest notice. The hull in connected to the netting of the balloon by long circular cords passed through the rings of the netting. When the captain of the gondola-sloop balloon wants to take to sea he merely has to give the mechanics the signal to descend; the easily-controllable balloon tacks downwards and stops when the gondola touches the waves. Then, by a very simple maneuver, the netting is detached and the balloon separates, perhaps to be towed behind or even deflated, until the moment when necessity requires it to resume its aerial course again.

  The Farandoul balloon floating over Paris undertook practice maneuvers every day, watched with ardent curiosity by the Parisians. Thousands of optical instruments were aimed at it in the hope of spotting the commander of the expedition—or, if not him, Lieutenant Mandibul, who was almost as popular—on the gondola’s deck. The roof of the Théâtre-Français had been transformed into a little observatory; all day long one saw nothing but telescopes and binoculars of every dimension aimed at the balloon by feminine hands.

  Eventually, Farandoul fund himself assailed every day by hundreds of unwelcome visitors; some of them proposed organizing pleasure-trips to the Pole using his balloon, others asked to go with him. An eminent tragedienne found a way to get into his study and beg him in the most enthusiastic terms, practically in verse, to enroll her in his crew.

  “I renounce art—all the arts,” she said, by way of conclusion. “I want to be an explorer; I want to contemplate the somber and icy pole face-to-face!”

  “Impossible, Madame, absolutely impossible—we have just enough places aboard for our men; with everything that is indispensable for such a voyage, the available space is strictly calculated. Our gondola-sloop could not even accommodate an extra child!”

  “What does that matter? I’ll lodge in the balloon if necessary!”

  Farandoul, after long hesitation, had decided to take his foster-father on his great expedition. He had searched in vain for a respectable bourgeois family with which to lodge him as a paying guest in the vicinity of the capital, but had not found one that offered sufficient reliable guarantees. As for placing him at the Jardin des Plantes again, there was no hope of that; the administration was still smarting from the after-effects of his escapade with the young monkeys. There was only one remaining option—that of taking him to the Pole.

  Paris was only informed 24 hours in advance that the moment had come for Farandoul’s balloon to leave. This brief interval sufficed for the authorities to take the measures necessary to prevent disorder among the crowds assembled around the Tuileries, in the Champs-Elysées and all the points from which people were able to watch the balloon’s maneuvers.

  Before giving the solemn order to cast off, Farandoul made a final inspection of the balloon to make sure that everything was in order and that no intruder had sneaked into the gondola. All was well; everything was in place—weapons, food supplies, instruments, emergency escape-balloons, magnetic buoys, etc. etc.—and all the men were at their posts. Mandibul was at the helm and our hero’s foster-father, appointed chief able seaman, climbed into the balloon’s rigging to monitor the aerial maneuvers.

  Farandoul leapt on to his quarter-deck and put his telephonic mouthpiece to his lips.

  “Cast off!”

  Powerful engines in the courtyard of the Carrousel cut through the four enormous cables retaining the aerostat promptly and precisely. The latter, as if breathed in by the firmament, rose into the atmosphere with a single bound, to an altitude of 1800 meters.

  An immense cheer released by two million human throats went up from the crowds accumulated at all points, from the Tuileries to the Arc de Triomphe, from Montmartre to the Buttes-Chaumont and Vincennes. The expedition to the North Pole was under way!

  In less than three minutes, the balloon had left the Carrousel and gained the upper layers of the atmosphere; it disappeared northwards and floated five or six leagues over the fields of the Ile de France.

  All of a sudden, the two million observers shuddered; the balloon, launched unhesitatingly toward the North, had just come about and was returning to Paris at top speed! What had happened? Had it suffered some mechanical breakdown? What did this sudden return signify?

  The balloon returned at full steam; the residents of Montmartre saw it pass over their heads and descend vertically over Paris. A unanimous cry of terror sprang from every throat—the balloon was going to crash into the ground and pulverize the houses beneath! The new Opera was under threat; that monument, so dearly bought, was about to be destroyed…

  But no, the balloon descended rapidly to the height of the Apollo on top of the Opera, stopped momentarily, and went up again as rapidly as it had come down into the upper layers of the atmosphere, to disappear conclusively into the blue.

  This is what had happened:

  The balloon had just reached the first clouds when an incident occurred on board. Farandoul, desirous of saluting Paris with a few salvoes of aerial artillery, had charged the two on-board cannons with powder when a human form suddenly emerged from one of the barrels, to the profound stupefaction of the gunners. Who was this intruder? Farandoul only needed a single glance to recognize the illustrious artiste who had begged him to take her to the pole. She had sworn to depart in spite of every obstacle, and she had kept her word!

  “O North Pole, I shall know thee!” she cried, as she exited from her cannon. “Here I stand, an explorer! I shall give my name to the islands and continents I shall discover; I shall study the splendors of the aurora borealis; I shall hunt polar bears; I….”

  The irritated Farandoul interrupted her. “Stop there!” he cried. “You shall go no further! What! You have the audacity to introduce yourself by climbing into, perhaps breaking into, my gondola! I am the master of my ship—do you realize that I could put you in irons for the entire duration of the voyage? But you’re a woman, and in consideration of that precious quality, I shall content myself with abandoning you on the first available bell-tower. We’re returning to Paris—prepare yourself!”

  And Farandoul telephoned an order to the engineers; the balloon turned round and set a course for the capital. At a word from his adopti
ve son, our friend the old monkey had offered his arm to the eminent tragedienne. He had his orders; as they passed over Paris, he was to deposit her on some elevated monument.

  We have already said that the balloon passed over Montmartre and paused for half a minute above the new Opera. That brief stop was sufficient; the eminent tragedienne, in a fit of anger, bit her knuckles in rage when she felt herself suddenly seized and lifted up by the monkey. Terrified, she closed her eyes. The monkey leapt over the rails and swung through the air with her, on the end of a rope.

  Thirty seconds, 30 centuries!

  The swinging stopped; she opened her eyes. Horror! The monkey was in the process of sitting her, piggy-back fashion, on the shoulders of a statue. The eminent tragedienne shuddered and clung on desperately to the monkey’s arm. She had recognized the statue; it was the great Apollo that stands, lyre in hand, at the most elevated summit of the new Opera.

  The monkey detached himself gently, deposited a kiss on each of the tragedienne’s hands, and let himself be carried aloft by the balloon.

  Two minutes later, the Farandoul balloon disappeared into the sky and the Opera’s firemen were preparing to effect the difficult rescue of the imprudent disciple of Melpomene.

  The gondola-sloop balloon, moving full steam ahead and favored by the atmospheric currents, took less than seven days to reach the first the polar ice-floes, at about 78 degrees latitude. All was going well aboard. Before setting out over the ice-sheet, Farandoul thought it necessary to conduct a serious trial of the navigability of the gondola-sloop. In consequence, the maneuvers commenced and the gondola-sloop descended gently to sea-level. The balloon, detached from the gondola, was put in tow, in such a fashion as not to inhibit the progress of the sloop.

  For two days, the gondola-sloop sailed northwards, towing the balloon behind; they made less rapid progress by this means than by air, but all went well. On the evening of the second day they reached the ice-sheet, the enormous, almost-uncrossable barrier of ice, which loomed up menacingly between the navigators and the Pole.