The Eternal Flame

by Michel Corday

  François, who did not want to believe in such a black outlook, remarked softly: “But you, my dear Laronce, will talk about my research, when the time comes?”

  Laronce was the news editor of the Bonjour.

  “Me? I can only talk about it if the boss authorizes me to do so. If he imposes a veto, my paper jumps to it. Even the advertising industry—paid advertising, you understand—will refuse yours insertion if it receives the order. Even if you found a major backer, and arrived with a wad of bills, the advertising industry would slam the door in your face, if the big men have decided that it should.”

  “There’s still an independent press, though.”

  “Nobody reads it.”

  “There are specialized journals; there are communications to Academies, scientific societies; there are lectures, the radio…what do I know?”

  “Well, yes,” Laronce admitted. “The rumor of your discovery will spread no matter what. Then there’ll be a change of tactics. You’ll be denigrated, doomed in the public mind. You’ll be held up to ridicule. It will be insinuated that it’s a fake, a confidence trick, a hoax. Or it’ll be presented as a laboratory experiment without any practical application, and full of dangers. Or, in the end, after having tried to wear down your patience, you’ll be granted the privilege of expert reports, which will be secretly sabotaged...”

  “You’re exaggerating, Laronce.”

  “Me? Come on! You know better than I do how all those who have proposed fuels less costly or less flammable than gasoline have been discouraged. What became of their trials? What became of the light accumulator discovered by a Spanish priest? In another field of research, what became of the methods of bread-manufacture that went directly from wheat to bread, free from the all-powerful mill?”

  “Perhaps those inventions weren’t workable?”

  “That’s what will be said about yours. Any means is good to crush the intruder. I’ve been told that the tire-manufacturers buy up all the patents that could supersede their tires, in order to bury them at the bottom of a drawer. And they might not be content to attack your invention—sometimes, they pick on the inventor. Do you remember Thimonnier, the inventor of the sewing machine, whom the tailors tried to drown?5 And Lebon, the inventor of gas lighting, murdered in the Champs-Élysées on the eve of Napoléon’s coronation? It was obviously the work of merchants of Argand lamps.6 And many others...

  “Of course, the invention doesn’t disappear with the inventor—but it’s held back. The murderers have gained time. That’s the great drama of technology: an industry becomes ferocious as soon as a new invention threatens its existence, or even threatens merely to change its equipment.”

  “Come, let’s not be dramatic,” said François, cheerfully. “The Lebon case was never clarified. And on the other hand, I can cite you numerous inventors who lived, as they say, laden with years and honors: Bessemer, who revolutionized metallurgy; Edison, whose little incandescent bulb put all other light-sources in the shade.”

  Laronce became exasperated. “The battle was less intense then than it is today. Think about the adversaries you’ll have against you. You cited the oil men yourself. You know full well that those fellows, when they’re fighting one another for supremacy, are ever-ready to transform their conflicts of interest into world wars—to throw the two halves of the globe against one another. Of what will they be capable the day when they unite against you!”

  He took a large silver watch out of his waistcoat. “Time for the paper to go to press! I have to run.” He paused in the vestibule, however, beneath the gigantic globe. “Adieu, Marianne. Excuse me for having spoken in front of you, but it was necessary that those things be said, and it’s better that you heard them.”

  He shook François’ hand, and added: “You too, old chap, forgive me. You understand—you’re flying at a high altitude in your dreams, as if in the clouds, and it needs an obscure little journalist like me to warn you about the dangers of landing. Believe me—don’t divulge your invention. Don’t start a fight that really is too unequal. Think about it. Take advice. Consult your nearest and dearest—and keep me up to date.”

  He fled.

  “What a character,” François murmured.

  He did not feel shaken. How little they counted, these risks—problematic, in any case—before the total certainty of alleviating suffering, spreading well-being, ameliorating the lot of human beings; before the hope of meriting their approval, their gratitude and their praise; before the pride of changing the face and fate of the world...

  He was still resolved to divulge his discovery. On that point, at least, he would not consult his relatives, as Laronce advised. His parents? He was their pride, their reason for living, their god. They lit up with joy every time he was able to visit them in the dear old Burgundian estate. Since his decision was made, and firm, what was the point of worrying them needlessly? What was the point of consulting Marianne’s father, Pierre Contal, since the famous author of Génie antique, passionately attached to the past, deplored science and denied progress?

  In the shadow of the enormous globe, Marianne had drawn closer to her husband. She did not say much. François called her his “silent darling.” To be sure, no one can exteriorize their most tender sentiments; it is one of the infirmities of the human creature; everyone keeps the best of themselves to themselves—but Marianne was subject to that strange modesty in the extreme, even though she had realized the most tender union and loving family with François. She looked up at him with her magnificent gaze and simply said: “What he said isn’t true, is it?”

  He hugged her to him, burying her in the hollow of his solid shoulder. “No, it’s not true. You know that. He sees everything in black. But I had to consult him. If he hadn’t been informed first, he would have been deeply hurt.”

  They went outside. The terrace was their garden. On a lawn, their two children were playing, watched by a young maidservant. They came running. Lise arrived first. She was seven. Because of her pretty face, her happy smile and her perfect little body, François called her “the majorette.” Two-year-old Claude followed her. His arms swinging, his hands waving, he threw his rounded belly and his awkward feet forward like a little Silenus drunk on life. He was at the gracious age that precedes the ingrate age.

  François lifted him high into the air and advanced to the edge of the terrace. In a great silence compounded from a thousand rumors, the ocean of Paris extended in the evening mist. And from the stone balcony, where so many ambitious dreamers must have invoked or cursed or challenged the enormous city, François, in his turn, spoke to the child he was holding in his arms.

  “No, my little Claude, it isn’t true, what that wretch Laronce says. No, no, now that energy will no longer cost anything, great things can be done. It’s necessary that in this great Paris, people can see as clearly by night as by day. It’s necessary that the whole world—the whole world, you hear—will be warm in winter and cool in summer. You’ll see that, my little Claude.

  “You’ll see the sky become clear, because we’ll no longer be expelling the smoke of coal fires into it. You’ll see the city extend, further and further, becoming, for thirty or forty kilometers around, an immense park of greenery, flowers and villas. As electricity, which can do anything, won’t cost anything, all that vegetation will be able to grow, thick and fast; rain or sunshine will be summoned to it according to its needs.

  “People will be able to live further away because they’ll be able to travel faster. After a day’s work, which will be made much easier, simpler and shorter, everyone will disperse in all directions, in lightning-fast cars. It will be the reign of guided projectiles, rockets, propeller-driven torpedoes. Yes, my little Claude, you’ll see that magnificent culmination: projectiles that will finally be useful for something!

  “And because life will already have become a little easier, people will become a little better. You’ll see all those things, my little Claude. And you’ll be able to glimpse so many o
thers...”

  II

  François took his entire family by road to the family house in Briolle where his parents lived. He brought them the great news. He imagined their pride, their excitement. He would certainly keep quiet about Laronce’s stupid warnings. They would seek the best means of spreading the discovery together.

  He enjoyed consulting them. With them, he became a child again. He still called them “Papa” and “Maman,” like a good child. They had, to be sure, kept him to themselves for a long time. His mother had given him his elementary education. His father had opened broad views on simple lines in the various directions of knowledge. Both had watched out for the awakening of a predilection, and as soon as they had noticed his liking for the physical sciences, they had encouraged and served it. He owed the intoxication of the first revelatory readings and the first small home experiments to them. At fifteen, he had left for Paris, where a family friend had adopted him during his external examinations at the college and his early years in the laboratory.

  No, truly, at Briolle he could not succeed in persuading himself that he was thirty years old. He rediscovered the enthusiasm, the exuberance and the gaiety of being fifteen in the family house where, beneath the patina of care and age, the wax and the fruit flourished. For him, it was like a tender museum in which a story or a memory was attached to every item of furniture, portrait or trinket. And he found it touching that the old dwelling had opened itself to young inventions, that electricity accomplished many household tasks there, that one could hear the purr of an automobile engine, that the telephone rang and the wireless sang.

  Impatient to arrive in Briolle, to proclaim his complete success joyfully, François drove at high speed. Finally, the familiar locations surged forth where he felt at home. Papa and Maman were waiting at the gate. She was strong and placid; he was tall and smiling; they both wore their vigorous fifties well. François was so accustomed to finding them immutable that he was ingenuously astonished to find slight signs of age in them: wrinkles deepening, hairs going gray.

  He yielded immediately to the pleasure of telling them the great news. During the first effusion, amid the awkward kisses of the arrival, he declared: “It’s finished. It’s complete. It’s done.”

  There was no real discussion, however, until after the evening meal and the children had gone to bed. François rediscovered the old family custom of lingering momentarily around the cleared table, his elbows on the cloth. He called that meeting “the Elbow Club.”

  What was the best way of spreading his discovery? He knew, vaguely, that it was customary to set up a joint stock company, but there his knowledge ended. They perceived very rapidly that all four of them were equally ignorant of the world and practice of business.

  The contrary would have been surprising. Monsieur Thibault, after a short stint in the Navy, had devoted himself to the estate that he had inherited from his parents. His wife belonged to a family of academics. Marianne had been brought up by a father who was illustrious, to be sure, but a worshipper of the past. François has lived primarily in the atmosphere of the laboratory.

  The young inventor was amused by their communal ingenuousness. Putting all their intelligence together, they would not have been able to distinguish a share from a debenture.

  “To think that in school they load our memories with so much superfluity and leave us ignorant of such useful things! We don’t learn the vocabulary of Finance, or that of the Law; we’re not even given the means to defend ourselves in life. We aren’t taught how the political machine functions, or the human machine. In brief, we’re ignorant of the mechanism of everything that surrounds us, from the doorbell to the progress of the stars…but all that can be sorted out.”

  Madame Thibault was unworried by their temporary embarrassment. She had such faith in her son that she was certain of his eventual triumph. One way or another, he would succeed. She had always taken her child’s side, fiercely—a true lioness. By the way she pronounced “my” when she talked about him, one sensed that, for her, other people’s children did not exist.

  Her husband did not share her serenity, however. He bit his fingernails and blinked his eyes—certain signs, in him, of emotion or anxiety. He confessed his fears. One heard stories of inventors dispossessed of their discoveries, robbed as in a wood. He sensed that his son needed a guide who was not only very well-informed but also very reliable and very honest. To whom should he entrust himself? He had no friends or relatives in the world of business.

  Marianne, who had remained silent until then, as was her habit, said discreetly: “Papa knows Chérance quite well.”

  Chérance! Although François remained a stranger to the world of finance, its language and customs, he was too keenly interested in the times in which he lived to be entirely ignorant of Chérance. He was haloed by a legend of delicate splendor, lucid audacity and proud honesty. The newspapers related that he maintained a squadron of aircraft, always ready to take off at a moment’s notice, either to take him to one of the sumptuous dwellings he had acquired throughout Europe, or to carry correspondence promptly, or even to supply his table with some rare and distantly-originated delicacy. In brief, he seemed be a head taller than the rest of the aristocrats of industrial banking, the new barons who ruled the world.

  He also had a reputation as a passionate bibliophile, the most fervent lover of sought-after books and rare manuscripts. Doubtless he cultivated the friendship of Pierre Contal out of admiration for that marvelous evoker of the past, the author of Laïs, Cadmus and Génie antique, but also in the hope of occasionally gleaning a few original manuscripts in his home. In that spirit of fervor, he could not refuse to welcome and aid the writer’s own son-in-law.

  Yes, Marianne the Silent was right.

  Thus, Pierre Contal would favor, indirectly, the diffusion of the great discovery. That collaboration had been quite unexpected, for the progress of science had no more furious adversary that the author of Génie antique. François knew something about that. He could not forget a certain historic scene, by which the fresh romance of his engagement had almost been interrupted.

  At that time, he had usually observed a sage discretion in Pierre Contal’s presence, imposing silence on his own opinions, as much out of respect for the Master as for love of his daughter. Then, one day, even so, he had yielded to a foolish temptation to convert him, to win him to his own views. He had proclaimed his faith in human progress, in the best of times, and had perceived too late, to his horror, that his future father-in-law could not tolerate contradiction, at least on that terrain. He had seen that man—ordinarily mild, polite and timid—bound and bristle, and then attack like a crazed wild boar. But for Marianne’s delicate patience, their marriage plans might have foundered that day.

  Now, that diehard disparager of progress was about to serve the cause of science, whether he liked it or not—for even in the unlikely event that he refused to give his son-in-law an introduction to Chérance, the young inventor would only have to present himself to the financier in the name of his father-in-law to be assured of a good welcome. And once again, François tasted the salt of the irony that gives life its authentic flavor.

  Except in winter, when he was resident in the house in Passy with which all his friends in the world of letters were familiar, Pierre Contal lived on the estate of Clos-Mussy, which he had acquired ten years before, two leagues from Briolle. Monsieur Thibault, who had a taste for writing, like most mariners, had hastened to show him his travel notes on the ruins of Easter Island as soon as he became aware of that illustrious neighborhood. A relationship had been formed. It was thus that, on his subsequent vacation, François had met Marianne. How many times he had traveled those two leagues, at all hours, by all means, in all weathers! He knew every tree on the route by heart.

  The day after the Elbow Club had recognized its ignorance, François, accompanied by Marianne, went by car from Briolle to Clos-Mussy. He went too rapidly to count the trees on the way, but he smiled at
the memories with which the road was strewn.

  Pierre Contal was expecting his daughter that morning. A letter from Marianne had notified him that she would arrive in Briolle the previous evening—for, although he had always refused to acquire a telephone, he consented to read his mail almost regularly, even though letters had to make use of modern means of transport: trains, automobiles and airplanes.

  The newspapers and magazines had often reproduced the features of Pierre Contal, for the suffrage of connoisseurs had brought him to the height of renown. The crowd followed him. His gifts as an evocative writer, his infallible erudition, and most of all his style, endowed with a Hellenic grace, were celebrated. Génie antique was unanimously considered as a perfect masterpiece.

  Marianne and François found themselves in his library, where books filled the walls, crushed the tables and inundated the floor.

  Of medium height, solidly built, gray-haired, with a fleshy nose and a bristling moustache, but a soft and kindly gaze, he was dressed without ostentation in brown flannel suit with a red kerchief at his neck and a skullcap planted on top of his head in the fashion of a zouave.

  He immediately inquired about Lise and Claude. He had a marked fondness for Lise, the majorette. The mysterious law of heredity often give children the features of their grandparents; Lise reminded him of his wife, who had died prematurely in the epidemic of influenza unleashed by the world war. His wife reappeared in that little girl; such resemblances are the smiles of shades.