In 1965

by Albert Robida

  “But I sympathize with you, Mother dear.”

  “Four weeks like that in remote lands. And for the end of that lovely wedding voyage, as a bouquet, Monsieur Montgrabel’s ill humor, because the observations of our excursion didn’t measure up sufficiently to his desires. A failed affair, he renounced it! I was worn out, at the end of my tether, he was exhausted, grumbling all the way home. A fine honeymoon!”

  “Mother dear, I suspect you of regretting, like me, the sunlit days of a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago...”

  “Certainly! But perhaps you think that if our honeymoon was mightily spoiled, I was able to make up for it in the following seasons? Yes, shouldn’t Monsieur Montgrabel, having become one of the great industrialists of France, and then of Europe, have tried to make me forget the initial disasters in the delights of an extraordinarily brilliant and marvelously organized existence? Oh, yes! What about the study of all the social questions attached to his enterprises? For I began, from then on, to direct affairs. But let’s only talk about the periods of relaxation, our fine vacations! Last year, 1964, you were here, you recall the seductive program. It should have been delightful, that restful cruise in a hydrodirigible over the coast of Norway, with ports of call in all the fjords, long walks at the foot of vertiginous cliffs, or in the great fir woods, in the silence of somber forests...

  “Yes, yes, two days in the fjords, where, in any case, the forests have been cut down, and then the hydrodirigible takes us to freeze for three weeks in Iceland, between the icebergs and the glaciers, to study a big deal! Always the red coal, but volcanoes that don’t warm. A failed deal, anyway, stolen by the Swedish Energy and Heat Company…Monsieur Montgrabel furious…!”

  “Oh, how cold I was!” said Suzanne.

  “And previously—you weren’t there then, it was before your marriage—there was another fine holiday season! That time, Monsieur Montgrabel had put on the program: no voyage, rest cure in Normandy, in the heart of old France! We were to stay for six weeks under the apple trees, in the hay, the flowers of the fields, the grass of the meadows. Yes, yes! Fundamentally, it was a matter of the work of broadening the channel from Paris to the sea…construction-yards to establish, administrative difficulties to settle, conferences with prefects, sub-prefects and bridge-engineers. A battle of engineers! Fifty of ours launched to the assault! What a campaign! ‘What are you complaining about?’ said Monsieur Montgrabel. ‘You vacation has been extended. Instead of the six weeks anticipated, we’ve stayed for two months!’”

  Madame Montgrabel was uttering such profound sighs that Suzanne, sympathizing, almost forgot her handbag.

  “I don’t know yet where we’re going this year, but it doesn’t matter; I promise you that you’ll be delighted, Mesdames,” said a man’s voice behind Suzanne, who shuddered in her armchair.

  Madame Montgrabel, still plaintive and sighing, did not budge, but Suzanne turned round.

  It was the telephonoscope behind her that had just spoken...

  Suzanne saw Monsieur Montgrabel himself leaning forward, his face enlarged, on the large crystal screen of the apparatus, on which the interlocutors of tele conversations appeared, in perfectly clear images rather than the tremulous ones of the early days.

  “I’ve been here for a quarter of an hour,” he said. “It’s a great pleasure to stir the memories of past summers like this, but it excites you so much that you don’t hear the tele bell. I understand your desire very well. In any case, I’m like you, I have aspirations to calm, to solitude in nature. I sigh for repose! So, I’ve been here for fifteen minutes, waiting for the opportunity to get a word in, but you didn’t give me time. So we’re going to chat tranquilly about what’s preoccupying you. As I said, our desires are concordant. I’m going to settle everything, and you’ll be delighted, utterly delighted, this time—you’ll see! I can’t leave my office, I’m expecting a couple of calls… So, as I was saying, like you, I experience a veritable thirst for the open air, for…but someone’s calling…my agent in Lyon…oh, business! Just a moment, I beg you...”

  A brief gesture, a Jovian frown, and Monsieur Montgrabel disappeared abruptly from the tele.

  He truly was the man of the great portrait, the authoritarian leader: tall and robust, with a full and red face, a long and forceful nose—a commanding nose, that always seemed ready to plunge forward, an “attacking nose,” as his former chiefs of staff said, who knew him well and divined solely by the movement of that nose, what decisions to take. Monsieur Montgrabel’s beard was still black, without a hint of dye, and his hair was scarcely retreating over his temples. He dressed in a jacket with a wide opening; the pockets to the right and left of the breast protruded, full of notebooks and wallets, each reserved for a certain order of business. The paper within remained almost blank, however, for Monsieur Montgrabel contented himself, instead of long notes, with scribbling hieroglyphs indecipherable for anyone else and for him; fortunately, rather than those cryptographic notebooks, he could be proud of his extra-solid memory, in which the smallest details of things that interested him were deeply engraved for all eternity, or very nearly.

  Madame Montgrabel watched her husband disappear from the tele screen, and turned to her daughter-in-law.

  “Aspirations for calm, and the sweetness of repose,” she said. “I’ve always heard him say that when it’s a matter of launching himself into some big deal…that worries me...”

  “No, Mother dear, he seemed genuinely desirous of a little rest...”

  “No, no, I remember! Thus, one year when he claimed to be absolutely exhausted by the turmoil of excessively numerous affairs, he had me organize and prepare, with great difficulty, every detail of an autumn season on Lake Chad. I would have preferred the Italian lakes, but her refused…too familiar, the Italian lakes, while Chad…and do you know, my child, that it was simply a matter of the purchase of warehouses, docks or factories of rubber, cocoa, palm oil, etc., and a general transformation of all those establishments... I was counting on spending a fine tranquil season on our comfortable air-pinnace, in a nice brand new bathing resort nestling between the giant trees of an immense park…as now, I was in my days of depression, but it was necessary to run from one shore of Chad to the other, to establishments almost always located in torrid or marshy places...and mosquitoes…and crocodiles, my child, crocodiles around our pinnace!”

  “Always exaggerating!” exclaimed the voice of Monsieur Montgrabel.

  This time, Monsieur Montgrabel was no longer in the tele; it was not his image but his person that lifted up the door-curtain of the room and arrived like an impetuous gust of wind.

  “I protest! There were only a dozen, at the most, of those crocodiles, which came uniquely to give us the pleasure of shooting them. But it’s no longer a matter of all that today—all that ancient history is no longer of any account. I have great news to announce to you, Mesdames, news that will lift you out of your dejection and depression immediately, make all the nervous troubles of which you’re complaining disappear, my poor dear love, and will also give you great pleasure, little scatterbrained and frivolous Suzanette, gracious specimen of the genteel ladies of times past!”

  “News?” said Madame Montgrabel, sitting up in her armchair.

  “Aha! That’s woken you up—already you’re not so languid! Well, this is the news: I…my resolution is made, I’ve decided, it’s settled...”

  “Come on, don’t keep us in suspense. What new great enterprise are you going to announce to me?”

  “Wait for it! I’ve decided…to give up business! I’ve decided to hand on the torch! I’ve decided to let go of everything! In a word, I’m abdicating. Can’t you see that I’m exhausted, depressed and languishing myself? You haven’t noticed that?”

  Monsieur Montgrabel struck his breast with a few solid blows of the fist.

  “Yes, my children, it’s settled, agreed with myself. I’ve already said a few words about it to my successors...”

  “Is this seri
ous?” stammered Madame Montgrabel.

  “Is it serious? It’s settled with my successors, I tell you. The company will become Montgrabel Sons, Daughters- and Sons-in-law. I’m going to invite them all: Charles, who’s returning from Java today, Edouard, Maurice, Henriette, etc.—all of them, in order to hand over the helm of the Montgrabel ship to them, saying to them: ‘Your turn, now! It’s up to you to make progress, to continue the movement. Me, I count on living henceforth a life of total repose, living like a petty rentier, yawning in the sun!’ What do you say to that, Madame? Are you satisfied? Look! Simply by virtue of having told you, I feel completely cheered up! Oh, hang on! Just a couple of words to say to someone...”

  Monsieur Montgrabel launched himself to the tele, rang, and shouted a series of numbers. Half a minute later, a bell replied and something flickered on the screen.

  Madame Montgrabel and Suzanne looked at one another.

  “Excuse me—just a couple of words to the Anzin Power Station,” said Monsieur Montgrabel. “There! We’re off...”

  The tele screen seemed to vibrate, light up and quiver. Becoming gradually more precise, like a fantastic apparition, there was a landscape of factories bristling with enormous chimneys, iron pylons, extraordinary buildings in which elevators overhung groups of tall towers, reminiscent of colossal and menacing steel Bastilles: massive blast-furnaces, reddened at the base by infernal mouths, forming something more than mere volcanoes.

  Something akin to a distant and continuous low hum emerged from it, profound breaths, the muffled noise of pile-drivers or other titanic machines, and smoke, accompanied by red fumaroles, which rolled and swirled on the screen, seemingly about to invade Madame Montgrabel room, so convincingly that poor Suzanne was already coughing and clutching her throat.

  The image became fixed. In a lighter cloud of smoke, a kind of vast office could be distinguished, with employees in the background, and electrical stations and consoles. There was a large window open over a cluttered canal, with the silhouettes of bizarre buildings in which flames flickered, and then the face of a man sitting at the apparatus, in the foreground.

  The conversation had already started.

  “Monsieur Crouzat, chief engineer of Anzin Power Station,” said Montgrabel, sketching an introduction without turning round.

  The two interlocutors were speaking loudly almost shouting, in order to overcome the incessant metallic racket out there. It was primarily a matter of numbers, tons of minerals, and smelting, which did not interest the two ladies very much. They strove to be patient, thinking about less severe things.

  What memories, again, for Madame Montgrabel! Anzin Power Station, one of the principal affairs of the Montgrabel Company after its great beginnings. The transportation crises with which there had so much difficulty in that period, until 1925, had caused broader minds to see a radical remedy. “To overcome the difficulties of transportation, let’s get rid of transportation!” they had said to one another. It was a definitive solution, a very simple program, but laborious and arduous in its realization. Monsieur Montgrabel, along with many others, had set to work. Madame Montgrabel remembered those years well!

  It was simply a matter of bringing all the coal-consuming industries into the mining regions, around the collieries, of making our coal-bearing regions as many factories. Thus, there would be no more cumbersome transportations, no more slow and difficult circulation of an immense quantity of railway-wagons or barges, and hence, economies of time, of materials, of costs of transportation and of manual labor, and enormous savings of money. Coal was consumed on the spot, almost at the pit-head, by thousands of factories; then, heat, energy and light were sent forth electrically, radiating everywhere, transported over the greatest distances and distributed for industrial, agricultural or domestic consumption.

  It had been long and hard, the period of labor, of creation—or, rather, of resurrection, for our mines and our factory installations had been destroyed by the enemy, emptied of all materials in the course of the frightful war, systematically, to begin with, in order to suppress competition, and in the end by demented rage, when the ferocious beast was at bay, and it had been necessary to reestablish, remake and recommence everything

  “Good, good, very good, go for the triphasic 1800-volt alternators,” said Monsieur Montgrabel. “That’s fine.”

  The press of a button, and abruptly, the apocalyptic vision disappeared, cutting of the continuous purr of the factory landscape. Anzin Power Station was no longer there, nor its chief engineer.

  III. The New Frontier and the Sacred Forest

  Monsieur Montgrabel had begun to build the fortune of his company immediately after the great torment, in the formidable worldwide movement of affairs that followed the universal upheaval. When the last flames of the war were extinct, the last embers stifled, the great labor began on the seething planet: a gigantic task that could not wait, and which demanded the effort and good will of everyone; a world to be reconstructed, nationalities and states to be reconstituted on new and more solid bases; the economic life of peoples to be reestablished; a better and definitive form to be given to old Europe and the entire world, pulverized and recast in the crucible of war, along with peoples, ideas, customs, commerce and industry, and life in general.

  Monsieur Montgrabel was only a petty industrialist making his debut in the aftermath of the war: open-minded, ready for anything, adapting to all situations and all métiers, getting a grip on all difficulties in order to overcome them, not recoiling before any task, and always disposed to knead possibilities and impossibilities in order to extract something advantageous from them by dint of ingenuity. Peace furnished him with a field of action in which to employ his qualities of audacity and his enterprising mind. He was well set for a good departure in the economic offensive.

  Audaciously, with two associates, one American and one Chinese, he took over a sector of the new frontier and set to work vigorously, the American partner supplying the machines, the diggers, the equipment and all manner of foremen, while the Asian furnished the manual labor. That new frontier, the great circumference of which followed all the undulations of the ground—hills, mountains, rivers and watercourses, whether the majestic Rhine or gracious rivulets scarcely named on the map—in a continuous line, doubled or tripled in places, sustained in places by forts and well-aligned redoubts, was his first great affair. An enormous labor too—but Montgrabel did not find his share sufficient and subcontracted other sectors. While constructing his new frontier, Monsieur Montgrabel rebuilt the murdered towns of his sector, and there was agreement in recognizing those cities as the most successful towns in the entire series.

  At certain points, the works of the new frontier encountered those of the Sacred Forest. The Sacred Forest—a forest scarcely born but more venerable and holier than the most ancient forests, more so than the forested sanctuaries of Gaul could be in our eyes—is the great forest that covers with its young shade and its adolescent stands of trees the entire devastated line of the former front: a forest as a sinuous and undulating as that had been, between fifteen and third kilometers broad and nearly five hundred kilometers long, from the Yser to the Vosges and the Rhine.

  What was it then? A broad deserted area, pitted with holes and fissures, a frightful lunar landscape coved in rubble, an immense battlefield furrowed by trenches, collapsed tunnels and blocked dugouts, bristling with iron brushwood.

  The hideous destruction had been such that the corpse of a humble house, or that of an old farm, scarcely consisted of a few scattered stones. The cadaver of the forest was perhaps even more tragic in appearance, extended over vast plains as if buried, with thousands of desperate arms emerging from the ground.

  One day, when the works of the new frontier intersected those of the Sacred Forest, and Montgrabel was examining with interest the vales covered with new plantations, he was hailed by a man who was studying a set of plans and maps among groups of workers of very various races.

  “Montg
rabel, my dear comrade, I knew that I’d end up running into you in this direction! I’ve followed your endeavors, you’ve reached mine. You see here Asia, Africa, America and Oceania fraternally digging the soil of old Europe after haring plied the rifle with her...”

  Montgrabel recognized Monsieur d’Hérouville, a former comrade.

  “Why, it’s you, d’Hérouville. What are you doing here, then?”

  “Gardener of the Sacred Forest, my friend! I’m planting, sowing and transplanting. I’ve come to collaborate with Nature in order to treat and bandage the wounds that the war has inflicted on the soil of France, to direct, assist and hurry alone the work of benevolent Nature. Instead of letting a simple tapestry of meager brushwood gradually cover the frightful scars, we’re going to cure our land, do our best to make it flourish, and cover it with a mantle of verdure that will become thicker and more beautiful with every passing year.

  “You see, it’s beginning to take shape. Apart from respected points particularly celebrated for their commemorative monuments—museums of the enemy’s crimes and the allied glories—we’re beginning no longer to rediscover the former front and its horrors. We’re bringing an entirely religious ardor to the impulsion of our labor...”

  “How much work there is for the entire country, in the devastated regions and the preserved provinces, as well as the works of the new frontier!”