The Master of Light

by Maurice Renard

  “At any rate, I understand now why, from outside, once darkness fell and a luminous image was produced by these mysterious panes, the left half of the window seemed to us to be dark, as if covered by some sort of curtain. It’s simply because, behind the ordinary panes as behind the other window, there was, in reality, only darkness. But these…retrovisory panes showed us the brightness of the past that they contain.”

  “My God, Monsieur Charles,” said Claude. “All this is beginning to get a little clearer now for me—but how do you explain that these panes suddenly began to mirror time past, since neither you nor I have ever noticed anything before? They’ve been, so to speak, dead, inanimate, for years and years; then, all of a sudden—bang! Here they are, alive, showing us a cinema film…”

  “Give me time to consider that question at leisure,” said Charles. “I haven’t explained anything yet, whatever you might think. I’ve simply described the phenomenon, by comparing it with what happens in the starry sky. Let’s verify something…”

  He opened the window then, not without difficulty—which proved that no one had done that for a very long time. As he had expected, the inexplicable images followed the movement of the batten. However it was positioned, one still perceived the moonlit grounds looking through it one way, and the dark room looking through it the other was—as if the batten still occupied its original position in the closed window.

  Charles was thinking unrelentingly. “Fetch me my tools, Claude. I want to take these two panes out; that will make it easier to examine them. And bring us a good kerosene-lamp.”

  Half an hour later, the two window-panes had been transported to Charles Christiani’s bedroom—and Charles Christiani devoted himself to a meticulous investigation of them.

  They were relatively heavy and very thick plates. When one examined them along the edge, that edge seemed to be composed of an infinity of very thin layers, some of which were black, others luminous and others of varying brightness. He felt each edge-section; its texture seemed to him to be laminated.

  The plates had been fixed in the window-frame with the aid of tacks and mastic, just like ordinary windows, but much too thick.

  What caused the person studying them to marvel further was that they were behaving exactly like window-panes and not at all like a projection-screen or the frosted glass of a camera obscura.

  We shall explain that immediately.

  Where a screen or the back wall of a camera obscura is concerned, you may change your location relative to those planes but it is always the same image that appears to you. You can duck down, raise yourself up, or move to the side, but you will not discover, by doing so, a single inch of supplementary image. By contrast, Charles, who was already amazed to have these live views of another place in his bedroom, perceived that he was able to vary the field and the perspective in accordance with his position, in the same way that, when one looks through a window, whether from the left or the right, looking down, looking up or straight ahead, close up or from a distance, the landscape, by courtesy of these movements, becomes partly invisible there, while being uncovered there, modifying the relationship of its lines, growing or shrinking.

  Charles tried to recall what appearance the secret substance had presented before, while it was still opaque and he had noticed it when he went to work in the little top room. He thought that he was not mistaken in evoking a mat surface analogous to polished slate, or rather a hard black—or blackened—wood; it was, moreover, the idea of pear-tree wood or ebony that lingered within him with the greatest tenacity. Now, though, because of the laminated texture, he was inclined to believe that it was a kind of slate, and he speculated: “A natural material? No. More likely a manufactured product.”

  When he tapped the “slate” with his finger, it made a very dull and muffled sound—which made Charles think of another substance formed of innumerable layers: mica.

  What more could he do, for now? The night was getting on. The three servants had gone to bed, much less emotional than such a sensational discovery merited. The full extent of its significance and its strangeness escaped them.

  The large bed offered a glimpse of its hospitable white sheets beneath its aged curtains, but Charles had not the slightest desire to lie down. He seemed to have been electrified, as if he had champagne in his blood! He was like the first man to discover the existence of electricity, the power of steam, the possibility of speaking at a distance or the omnipotent properties of a liquid or a gas. And besides, the historian in him experienced an incomparable sensuousness therein. An artisan of the past, loving vanished eras as a musician loves sounds and a sculptor marble, he experienced an acute joy in possessing these things, in his room, in front of him—these two seeming marvels which were, although present, of the past: of the real, palpitating past. They were the extraordinary location in which, at least for the eyes, the life of the world unfolded with a delay of about a century. They were History, not preserved on film, but admirably present, although ancient!

  It made him shiver—because, confusedly, but with an increasing vehemence and an anxiety that became sharper, the superstitious conviction was taking hold of him that the apparition of César Christiani was not a matter of chance. That the apparition was scientific was of scant importance—were there any other kind, after all? Could anything happen, even in Heaven, that did not conform to the laws of Creation? The indisputable fact was that César had appeared—a natural revenant, but a revenant all the same—and at which moment among all the billions of moments of duration? At the exact moment when the memory of his tragic death had opposed itself to the happiness of his great-great-grandson. Coincidence? A poet putting the story into verse would rhyme that word with “Providence.”

  Oh, to be sure, this could do nothing to change the situation directly—but for Charles, it took on a profound and fateful significance. It was a kind of encouragement: a sign, or something even more inexpressible, which, enveloped in mystery, sent forth an obscure appeal to new sentiments, imprecise but salutary.

  Nothing makes as much impact on human beings as the unexpected intersection of events at the crossroads of destiny; they are always tempted to call it a pointer rather than chance. Those who do not resist the temptation feel happy.

  One might say, moreover, that Rita Ortofieri was party to that solitary celebration. Charles, overflowing with ideas and emotions, exultant with enthusiasm, had perceived that henceforth, in spite of his determination, he would no longer be able to experience either joy or pain, or any other vivid reaction, without associating Rita with his own destiny—even Rita absent, distant, aged, dead! The thought of Rita could never become foreign to him. He had to admit that it had never left him for an instant. Neither the soothing diversion of the journey not the bewildering bizarrerie of the consecutive adventure had succeeded in driving away that imaginary presence. And how could it not take on a new sharpness at a time when Charles, separated from everyone, surrounded by silence and peace, found himself face to face with a night from another era, and contemplating—magical, terrible and delightful as it was!—the bright white face of that Moon, behind which slept the César Christiani whose future fate, to be murdered by Fabius Ortofieri, he knew!

  For the past night wore on within the two window-panes, peaceful and slow, but neither more slowly nor more rapidly than the present night. And Charles could not get enough of the spectacle of those hours fallen into oblivion.

  Suddenly, in the background of the scene of yesteryear, he saw the planet Venus twinkling in a paler darkness, and the whitening sky cut out the jagged horizon in silhouette. He turned one of the plates over and saw within its rectangle the first glimmers of dawn lighting to the little top room, as if, hanging from the guttering of the tower, he were spying on that interior through the window—but the spectacle of the exterior was more interesting, so he returned to it.

  The ancient dawn spread its dew, its radiance and its nuanced tenderness over the garden of yesteryear. Scarcely had the
sun appeared when the peasants headed for the vineyard. Some wore short culottes and thick stockings, others wore trousers, but all of them—all those people now dead—were decked out in costumes that resembled disguises. A horse-drawn cart was brought, and vats unloaded from it. A dozen men and women went into the vineyard; it was harvest-time.

  Then he saw the door of the château open—the one that the porch was later to shelter—and the early-rising châtelain emerged. He was dressed, as on the previous day, in his green jacket with the brown collar. Large striped mariner’s trousers floated about his legs. His felt hat had broad rims folded back in rolls. A monkey was gamboling at his side; a magnificent green and yellow parrot was sitting on his shoulder.

  Charles, infatuated with all things Historical, had not forgotten anything from the annals of Captain Christiani. He knew the parrot’s name: Pitt; and the name of the chimpanzee: Coburg—names facetiously forged by César to caricature the English and Austrian adversaries of the Revolution and Napoléon I. Nothing could have amused him as much as seeing the animals commemorated in his memoirs in company with the former corsair.

  He watched the master go into the pathway through the vineyard, his servants bowing to him with an emphatic respect that has disappeared completely from our customs. Then a sturdy fellow who seemed to be authority over the others, summoned an old woman in a bonnet, bent over by the years, and Charles understood that he was explaining something to do with the old woman. Indeed, César handed a well-filled purse to the poor woman, who started kissing his hands, while Pitt and Coburg extended themselves, each in his fashion.

  The charitable scene was a flash of enlightenment for Charles, for he remembered quite clearly that César had thought the generous gift he had made to an old grape-picker, when he was on the point of leaving Silaz for Paris, worthy of mention in his writings. It followed that the autumnal day so marvelously conserved and restored by the retrospective plates was one of the last days in the month of September 1829.

  At that moment, Charles noticed that the sun had risen in the present, as in the past, and that a new day was beginning in the month of September 1929. A century, exactly, separated the two mornings that he was contemplating at the same time.

  VI. A Century

  A century. Exactly.

  It is easy to imagine Charles’s state of mind. The marvel that he had just discovered filled him with a passionate curiosity that had not yet begun to attenuate. Besides, at the moment of which we are speaking, he was still steeped in ignorance; a dense cloud of mystery enveloped the prodigy that he was observing but could not explain—a circumstance that lent an incomparable attraction to the adventure.

  All day long he remained in his room, absorbed by the extraordinary contemplation of the haunted windows, and by the examination of the problem that they posed relative to physics—and quite probably to other sciences. He had cleared the mantelpiece and had installed there two window-panes there, one beside the other, instead of the clock and the rococo candelabras. The first showed him the grounds in 1829; the second, because he had set it the other way round, showed him the interior of the little top room. And in the mirror, against which the plates were leaning, the inverse views were reflected, the first plate showing the room and the second the park: outside and inside; inside and outside.

  Claude, Péronne and Julien came to keep “Monsieur Charles” company from time to time and marvel with him at the astounding spectacle, almost incredible by virtue of the suddenness and unexpectedness that characterized it—for humankind has seen and will see many others, and this phenomenon, which was astonishing enough to amaze a admirably cultivated young man, was certainly no more prodigious than the effect of X-rays, a manifestation of wireless telegraph waves or television.

  At a time when the miracles of science allow our skeletons to be seen through our flesh, transmit words and images through space without wires, and project the living appearance of a person or a place across leagues of distance, in truth, what Charles Christiani saw before him—that phenomenon of special television, of retrovision—was not so formidable. Except, of course, that it was totally unexpected.

  Charles, however, became accustomed to it. Everything, alas, is subject to the calming and dulling action of habitude, that inexorable de-gilder. He accustomed himself to it to the extent that he desired—and he desired it, knowing that every man must beware of the slightest sentimental or emotional distractions. So he stifled the stirrings of his heart and soul that attempted to agitate him when, by virtue of a an accumulation of undeniably true details, the image of 1829 reminded him that what he saw there was a corner of Savoy that was not yet French, although King Charles X had still to reign in France for a few more months; that he was seeing things, animals and people, trees and clouds, of 100 years ago!

  Doubtless because of the grape-harvest—a traditional festival—the old corsair’s family had gathered at Silaz. As the morning advanced, in the bright sunlight of a lovely day, Charles saw César’s son mingling with the grape-pickers: Horace, aged 37; and his wife, whom the observer had some difficulty identifying and not confusing with Horace’s sister Lucile, aged 34, coiffed in a beribboned capeline and having, like her sister-in-law, vast leg-of-mutton sleeves and a bell-like skirt with flounces. Two children, delightfully dolled-up, were playing tag in front of the château: little Napoléon, Horace’s only son, 15 years of age, and little Anselme Leboulard, Lucile’s son, who was 14.

  Charles was in no doubt about it; it was them. That genteel little squire in the tasseled cap, was really his great-grandfather, who had died in 1899 at the age of 85—only five years before Charles was born. And the other one, with his little English jacket and his shirt so blithely open on his breast, yes, that had to be the future Court Councilor, who had died in Paris in 1883, the father of cousin Drouet “who had behaved badly toward Mélanie.” For, as often happens, of the two branches issuing from César Christiani, Charles’s counted five generations and that of Cousin Drouet only three.

  “So,” Charles murmured, “this is my great-grandfather Napoléon, and that’s cousin Anselm…unless it’s the other way round. Children! One might think that it was a painting by Isabey.11 Bah! After all, if the cinema had been invented in the time of Charles X, this family scene wouldn’t surprise me at all! In 100 years, my grandsons will see me on the screen and not experience the slightest astonishment in consequence.

  My grandsons! he thought, as a shadow passed over his thoughts. My sons! And Rita, in spite of everything, emerged once more within his reverie, with her luminous gaze, so frank and firm.

  Péronne was there; while putting a tablecloth and cutlery on a side-table she never ceased looking at the plates and repeating, enthusiastically, that she did not understand it at all.

  Charles touched the surface of the enigmatic substance yet again. Always the same impression: that of caressing frosted glass on the frosted side; no remarkable warmth or coldness. The phenomenon seemed to be exclusively due to the light and the nature of the material in which it produced the effect…

  The 100-year-old landscape was slightly darkened by the effect of the means that had conserved it.

  The nature of the material… Charles repeated to himself.

  On examining the plates sideways, very attentively, an almost-imperceptible fuzz could be felt, furthering the resemblance to frosted glass. There was no reflection.

  “The nature of the material…” reasoned the young historian. “Let’s see: when light goes through red glass, it becomes red, and we see a red landscape. Analogous results for all the colors.”

  “That I understand,” said Péronne, “but what I don’t understand…”

  “Wait!” said Charles. “When light passes through crystal lenses or crystal prisms, it’s deflected or decomposed. When light travels through water rather than through air, it’s slowed down. Yes, Péronne, underwater, for example, the image of objects reaches us less rapidly that on the surface of the ground—very little less rap
idly, but all the same, mathematically speaking, less rapidly.”

  “These plates, then,” said Péronne, “are, so to speak, like plates of water that slow down light 100,000 times more than ordinary water?”

  “Evidently!” Charles exclaimed. “These panes are composed of a substance in which light is slowed down in the same way that it is in water, in the same way that sound is slowed down in certain media. You know full well, Péronne, that one hears a sound more quickly through, for example, a metal conduit, or any sort of solid, than through the open air. Well then, Péronne! All of these phenomena belong to the same family!

  “This, therefore, is the solution: these kinds of pane slow light down to a remarkable degree, since it only requires a relatively small thickness to retard it by 100 years. It takes 100 years for a ray of light to transpierce this layer of material! It must take one year to transpierce 1/100th of this depth.”

  It was then that, taking a sudden decision, Charles Christiani picked up one of the two plates and, with abundant precautions, inserted his pocket-knife into the center of the slice, in order to try to split the plate, in the whole of its breadth and length, into two halves, maintaining the same surface area, each of near-equal thickness.

  He succeeded without difficulty; nothing was easier than separating one from the other, “cleaving” the innumerable layers of the stratified substance.

  Having thus divided one of the two plates into two, he looked at the planes that he had just separated; and he saw what he expected to see—which is to say, on the one hand, the grounds and the façade of Silaz as they had been half way between 1829 and 1929, in 1879, with the porch over the drawing-room door; and on the other, the little top room, always the same through time, since it had not been touched for such a long period.