The Clock of the Centuries

by Albert Robida

“That’s my documents finished, 24 sous earned, dinner and cigarettes!” he said, stopping after releasing an oof! of satisfaction. “I can now work for myself…alas! To pile up another stack of manuscript pages for which I’ll have trouble finding a publisher among the few brave souls who still persist in printing anything but dispatches. A little morning or afternoon job in one of the offices of the Laforcade company would at least have assured me peace of mind while leaving me time for myself, but Monsieur Laforcade did not seem to understand when I talked to him about it—or, rather, I did not dare to explain myself clearly. My coat is a trifle too threadbare to risk going into Madame Laforcade’s drawing-room, as I once did...then again, it appears that all is not well in the household, if what they say can be trusted….bah! Let’s get on with it, for as long as the solicitor continues to give me documents to copy, and as long as he and all the other solicitors aren’t carried off to Hell along with their clients!”

  At 68, Eudoxe Palluel was in dire straits. The Academy had been abolished three years before; all art and all literature, ornament or bread of the mind, honor and finery of societies, had disappeared as occupations, gradually swept aside by a kind of dominant bestiality that had submerged all the delicacies within the coarse and brutal struggle that life had become. In order to subsist while awaiting an improvement for which, in his wild optimism, he still forced himself to hope, Eudoxe Palluel found himself obliged to perform the humblest tasks of the only instrument of labor he had ever known, the pen. The pen, the blade of thought, sometimes the instrument of glory—but also, alas, the first and most terrible agent of social disintegration.

  He wrote:

  “In these first years of the 20th century, under the frightful cloud of the imminent tempests, it is a son of Old Europe who darts a melancholy glance over the maternal earth, glorious and exhausted, over the meager continent whose sons have held the scepter of the conquered world for such a long time, and governed hosts of peoples in the name of the ideals for which Europe thought, dreamed and stood.

  “Like individuals, races, fatherlands and continents also pass through the fundamental phases of life—youth, middle age and senility—that invariable succeed one another in the same order. Gamboling in the foam of oceans, the more-than-adolescent America, young Oceania, daughters of Europe as she was a daughter of venerable Asia, are leaping forward to grab in their turn the scepter that Europe is allowing to escape from her weakening hands. Must the empire and direction of the world, in the era that is about to begin, really pass into the audacious hands that are claiming them? Is the ancient blood of Europe, tainted by many poisons—and poisoned above all else by the alcoholism of ideas—entirely exhausted? Has the time really come for some new and ardent race to take its turn, overturning all the traditions of the Old World, trampling underfoot the memories of thirty centuries, smashing their accumulated works forever, and steering the universe in a new, unknown direction?

  “What will the queens of tomorrow, America and Australia, do once they are enthroned? Will the world bubbling in the crucible of the future be able to fill these new continents with splendors comparable to those that the lands of Europe have produced in the vast Past, during the peaceful or violent struggles of greedy civilizations, while its nations influenced and were influenced by one another.

  “Today, everything seems to be finished. The curtain is falling on our final act. If we turn a dazzled eye upon the past of Old Europe, at hazard, peering through the centuries and the nations to the most distant yesterdays, what magnificent frames for active and thinking beings we can admire from age to age, modifying and transforming themselves while the torrent of ideas and events flows on! The slow accumulation of progress in spite of abrupt setbacks and formidable catastrophes, while the arts are born and develop, wounded by the devastations of barbarous invasions, germinating again in the dust of ruins and flowering in spectacular blooms, and while the sciences emerge gradually from the meditations of thinkers—all leading to a terminal point that is difficult to identify, an invisible and fatal limit that must be surpassed, after which art becomes corruption, science unhealthy and destructive madness, and progress the perfidious and inflexible executioner of life.

  “That fatal boundary has, alas, been crossed! The role played by our Old Europe, the enlarged fatherland to which we are bound by every fiber of our being, is concluded! Proudly ordained splendors of great epochs, you shall never be seen again; exquisite flowers of extinct civilizations, your perfumes shall no longer be respired…”

  The pen of Academician Palluel came to rest. His forehead furrowed sadly. He consulted a little notebook in which he had noted down his plan and set out a long list of chapter titles:

  The Roman City

  Celtic and German Forests

  Italian Republics and Lordships: Venice; Florence; Genoa; Sienna

  Flemish Cities and German Free Towns

  The Feudal Rhine

  The Swiss Cantons

  The Château and the City

  Etc. etc.

  “Eighteen months of work, at least; two volumes, each of 500 pages, needless to say! Will my solicitor furnish me with documents to copy until then? There’s so much competition in these sad times…my old fingers are too awkward to operate a typewriter, alas, or I would have been able to type addresses at two francs a thousand… An appreciable supplement… Enough!”

  V. A Few Newspaper Cuttings and Other Documents Found in the Pockets of a Half-Burned Coat,

  Which Fragments Might Serve As a Rapid Explanation

  RECTO

  ….tories no longer dare deny the possibility

  catastrophe. All indications to the contrary

  news arriving by the minute confir-

  pprehension that the hour has come of

  courage and to wait for the fright-

  lamities, in seeking the means

  ith the energy of which we are

  the frightful destiny that menaces us

  seeking to calm the terrors

  VERSO

  The forces of nature unleashed,

  these cyclones ripping up the ground in all directions

  ravaging and destroying immense

  beneath the ruins, entire populations

  in any epoch of prehisto-

  in human memory, it

  no memory of parallel cataclysms

  solutely nothing similar to

  RECTO

  Picking up a few rare dispatches. Telegraphic and telephonic lines all destroyed or out of commission almost everywhere; useless to attempt wireless telegraphy in the midst of this electrical deluge.

  All social life has virtually come to a stop; there are only people madly fleeing the devastated countries or populations gone to earth in precarious shelters.

  VERSO

  Six weeks ago we thought, at the time of the first disturbances and the first cataclysms, that it was a simple matter of local catastrophes, of which the world had seen so many in all sorts of places, and we were already thinking about the usual means of assisting the victims. We opened subscriptions and advocated lotteries. Alas, there is no question of all that, now that the catastrophes are multiplying and becoming general.

  VI. Other Morsels

  The tidal wave that ravaged Western Europe the day before yesterday, to an extent as yet undetermined, was definitely accompanied by powerful earthquakes, since collapses were also numerous in areas of high ground that the immense wave did not reach. That frightful night lasted thirty-eight hours before its darkness dissipated. The survivors of the disaster are asking questions, interrogating one another. What has become of Paris, France and the world?

  Telephonic communication is gradually being restored. Some news is beginning to reach us, of one disaster after another. Northern Europe has had its share too, and it seems that a second wave originating in the Baltic must have joined up with the Western wave. That must be the cold countercurrent observed, it is said, after the first and most furious flood.

&nb
sp; A large ship, extensively smashed up, lies embedded in sand near Rennes; not far away, an entire forest of twisted and tangled trees, still dressed in their foliage, has buried two or three villages. Where has it come from? No one knows. Timbers with the remains of signs in English and Swedish, it is believed, are obstructing the valley of the Seine as far upstream as Rouen, of which there is no news. All the ports have been destroyed…

  We did not expect, on hearing three days ago of the frightful earthquakes in Greece, Sicily and Italy, to see Western Europe ravaged so rapidly in its turn. The Observatory has been completely destroyed; there is no longer any possibility of reliable observation, and no definite information can come from that source. The few surviving scientists who have been able to come together amid so many ruins are in dire accord in dreading that new disasters will descend upon us very soon.

  Nature has granted us a truce, nothing more; the electrical charge in the atmosphere remains the same, the storms burst and intersect as if to complete the world’s collapse. We are waiting. This newspaper will appear until the end, every day if possible, so long as a single writer remains standing and a single press in working order.

  SHEET OF PAPER: VERSO

  May 16 or 17. 8 Boulevard du Sud, Neuilly.

  The Word has been pronounced: the Word at which we once laughed, as if at a fairy tale: the End of the World! Is this not the end of the world, the end of our universe, or our Earth, the poor petty ball on which humankind, for thousands of years, has suffered, loved, worked, hoped? The end of everything?

  The terrifying cataclysms of which we have been witnesses—or victims—can only make us think so. All the elements are unleashed; we live, if this is still life, amid the fracas and the supernatural flamboyance of millions of thunderbolts, rolling and hurtling down upon terrified populations.

  Between the explosions, the sky is black. Is this really night? Will day come again? What time is it? I don’t know.

  The stars seem to be entering into the universal oscillation; the Moon appears to be falling on the earth; they say that it’s drawing closer, that it’s passing obliquely through the terrestrial atmosphere.

  And I make these notes, while waiting for the house to collapse on my head at any moment. Why make notes? Why, if we are all doomed to perish? To tell the truth, I think it’s simply to occupy my fingers, calm my nerves and, in a word, to divert my fear a little.

  SHEET OF PAPER: RECTO

  ACTION OF DIVORCE

  Madame Claire-Berthe Palluel, plaintiff, against Monsieur Robert Laforcade, engineer of Arts and Manufactures, proprietor, her husband.

  In virtue of… etc., etc…

  Given on the one side the most complete incompatibility and lack of understanding, etc.

  And on the other side, etc., etc.

  ANOTHER SHEET OF PAPER:

  Monstrous collapses have occurred. I don’t go out. It would be impossible to go out without risking being squashed flat before taking 100 steps. A sort of turbulent cyclone. Earthquake? Probably. Everything’s shaking. There are two feet of water in the boulevard, with violent whirlpools. Where has the water come from? It hasn’t rained for at least twelve hours. The entire block of houses on the other side of the street is cracked. If I lean out of the window I can see heaps of debris like enormous barricades to the right and the left. With the interlacing lightning flashes and the explosions of thunder, one could believe that the barricades were under attack and being defended. Alas, we’ll see no more of those petty trifles, those silly quarrels between human insects….

  Our house is trembling, the ceilings giving way. Where to seek refuge? Is there a refuge to find?

  I can see the flames of a great conflagration in the west.

  The water-level’s increasing downstairs. Squalls of rain now—or, rather, deluges of rain beating down as if a lake were emptying above our heads.

  I’m alone since the divorce proceedings were begun. The word “divorce” almost makes me laugh, given the terror we’re experiencing—those of us who are still breathing.

  ANOTHER SHEET:

  An hour ago, I thought that it was all over. With my hands above my head to protect it, I hesitated between two courses of action: to remain in the shaking house or to go out, to die just as certainly, but on the move, running, fleeing…and here is a sudden calm; the storm has ceased its roaring….

  Resumption. Lightning has struck the house. Everything in the apartment is upside-down. I’ve just regained consciousness.

  The noise and, it seems to me, the tremors are increasing.

  This time, I think this is it!

  End of Prologue

  CHAPTER I

  In Which The World Is Astonished

  To Find That It Still Exists

  A great calm. A nature weary of turning somersaults, which seems to be catching its breath. After the cyclones and the torments, the breeze that is blowing now is scarcely strong enough to disturb a few leaves at the very tops of the trees.

  After the deluges of water, which changed the smallest streams into furious torrents, after the eruptions of lava and mud, and after the terrifying tidal wave, nothing but occasional showers of warm drizzle, sleepy rivers, gently-trickling streams, and clear and limpid pools. After the frightful uproar and the formidable collision of all the forces of incensed nature, the most complete silence everywhere: a silence that the birds, still mute, seem to be afraid to disturb.

  Human beings, after the five months of the Great Upheaval, observe in surprise that the universe has not been utterly annihilated by decree of the Supreme Will—a fate to which, with their strength exhausted and their nerves stretched to breaking point, they had fully resigned themselves.

  During those five months, when the globe shuddered beneath electrical discharges, people eked out a living in their various hiding-places, in the precarious refuges into which they had fled, trembling, shivering and waiting—as their prehistoric ancestors must doubtless have done during the cataclysms of the world’s earliest ages.

  Having no news of anywhere else, no society existed any longer among the ruins accumulated by the catastrophes, save for small disconnected groups of humans, vegetating while prey to every possible anguish. The humankind of cities, ultra-civilized humankind, thus lived a prehistoric life in caves, with the sole ambition of escaping the wrath of the unchained elements and of finding meager daily nourishment amid all the dangers…

  The calm arrived suddenly and unexpectedly; in the space of a few hours the phenomena became less terrifying; the roar of the immense torment faded to groans that grew duller and duller. Finally, daylight reappeared…

  The life-cycle of humankind was, therefore, not complete, as everyone had believed. The stupefied universe observed that it still existed. The Sun was still shining, the sky became blue again; the air that people breathed was no longer charged with sulfur and electricity; people could emerge from their holes, cellars, caves, trenches or partly-collapsed houses without the fear of receiving a mountain upon their heads, a tree across their bodies or a Niagara about their legs.

  Robert Laforcade, intoxicated with cheerfulness and befuddled by astonishment, recovered consciousness in a covert in the hills of Burgundy, into which he had been thrown without knowing how, where he had lived in holes, quarries, cellars and caves with other fugitives brought from different directions by the catastrophes. Robert perceived that he had a long beard, clothes reduced to tatters held together by threads, a body covered in cuts and bruises, an atrocious hunger and an immense desire to know, now that it was over, what had happened: to take account of events; to learn as quickly as possible what might remain of the old world—and, if he could, to find his wife, about whom he now thought without anger.

  Robert Laforcade stood up, raised his arms to the sky and immediately tried to launch himself forwards. He leapt down rapidly to the foot of the crag he had climbed and took a few paces, but his head swam, a pallor invaded his hollow features, and he fell heavily to the ground. Other p
eople ran towards him: emaciated and ragged individuals dressed in the ill-fitting debris of clothes, who had emerged, as he had, from the shelters in which they had long been trembling. These people, companions in misery and terror, seemed almost mad with joy before the extraordinary and sudden appeasement. They rushed to help him, lifting him up and carrying him into a sort of cave hollowed out in the flank of the hill, in which they had been cringing for a fortnight, like their troglodytic ancestors, under perpetual threat of being struck by lightning, crushed, drowned or starving to death.

  After long weeks of overexcitement and terror, a crisis of exhaustion had struck Laforcade down just at the moment when the danger seemed abruptly to have vanished.

  CHAPTER II

  In Which The Survivors Observe Several New Facts

  And Some Rather Significant Changes

  Robert Laforcade was ill for three months, weak and feverish, suffering—like many others—from nervous exhaustion. He slowly recovered his strength in a large house, which had been discovered open and abandoned near to the refuge. He was cared for by some of his companions—men and women unknown to him before the Great Upheaval, for whom he had once struck down a wild boar with hatchet-blows, at a time when they were suffering greatly from hunger, in the same manner as the ancestors of the world’s earliest days, and for whom he had risked his life to go in search of a few meager vegetables in the ravaged fields.

  The calm was permanent. Since the day when the immense fracas had been abruptly interrupted, nothing had troubled the gentleness of the appeased elements. There had only been benign winds and benevolent showers of rain, after which rainbows appeared in the field of clouds: the ancient sign of pacification and protection, a symbol of hope greeted by all hearts with the same gratitude as before.