In A Thousand Years

by Emile Calvet

  “The author is not mistaken about this object,” said Terrier, pointing out an old compass. “He rightly attributes the discovery to the Neapolitan Flavio Gioja at the beginning of the 14th century, and refrains from citing the widespread but unjustified opinion that Marco Polo had brought once back from China in 1260, where, according to the Chinese, it had been known more than ten centuries before Christ.”

  The physicist was interrupted by Antius, who read another caption: “Known in the remotest antiquity.”

  “What was?” asked his nephew.

  “The gnomon.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m talking about the sundial before my eyes. The Chaldeans made use of the first, as the caption rightly recognizes.”

  To one side, the biretta of an assize-court judge, mounted on a stalk, was designated under the label Indoor headgear.

  “Look,” said Terrier. “A clock of our era, perhaps the only one in the city—and the explanation given of it is very detailed. Here it is:

  “This badly damaged apparatus once served to measure time. The first clock to appear in France had been sent to Pepin le Bref in 760 by Pope Paul I. Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, in 807, sent another to Charlemagne, along with an organ, a musical instrument then unknown to Occidentals. Chiming clocks appeared in the middle of the 14th century. In 1647 Huygens added the pendulum, discovered by Galileo. It is only from that epoch that the division of the hour into sixty minutes, and the minute into sixty seconds, date.”

  The sagacity of the commentator appeared to have been misled, however, by a cylindrical object equipped with a thick layer of bristles, which bore a card reading: Unknown object.

  “What is that?” asked Antius.

  “It’s a hairbrush of the latest model, by which the head of the patient is labored with extreme rapidity,” said Gédéon. “But here, of course, is an object that’s not unfamiliar to you.” He held up a large pair of spectacles mounted on a vertical axis.

  “I’m only on my eighth pair, thank God” declared the doctor. “What does it say about them?”

  “It says,” replied the young man, leaning over the instrument, “that their invention goes back to the 12th century, if one attributes it to Roger Bacon. It adds that magnifying lenses are due to the Dutchman Jacques Metius or, according to others, his compatriot Zacharius Jansen. Galileo, the note adds, constructed the telescope shortly afterwards, which permitted numerous scientific discoveries, and in the 17th century, Rheita fabricated the first binocular telescope. Is that true.”

  “Quite true,” said Antius.

  “O vanity of vanities!” exclaimed the physicist, who had just plunged his gaze into a large display-case. “We find here, relegated to the rank of antiques, the apparatus of which the 19th century was justly proud.” His companions drew closer to him, and he continued. “Here are the various telegraphic systems that replaced one another successively over a period of thirty years by reason of their relative improvement. There’s the old dial telegraph, improved by Bréguet, which was almost exclusively reserved in our time for service on the railway, but excited great admiration at first. Here’s the Morse system, which constituted a great advance in the speed, ease and reliability of translation of dispatches. This next one is the Hughes apparatus, which was operated like a piano and printed telegrams with great rapidity. Finally, in that corner, you can see the instrument invented by Caselli, which reproduced the sender’s message with absolute fidelity. Let’s see what the contemporary opinion is.”

  And the scientist read aloud: “Primitive instruments of electric telegraphy, How different they are from our apparatus, founded on the triple effect of the current, the telephone and the phonograph, which permit continuous conversation over a distance of five hundred leagues.”

  “Ho ho!” said Gédéon. “Isn’t it a descendant of Monsieur de Crac who wrote that caption?”33

  “It is not permitted to anyone to set limits to the progress of applications of electricity,” replied the physicist, peremptorily.

  “What’s the significance of this hood?” Gédéon asked, pointing to a kind of gutta-percha burnoose of bizarre form. Having drawn nearer to the singular object, he cried “Oh, marvelous! I’ll read: Twentieth-century umbrella. This comfortable apparatus was carried coiled around the waist. By pressing a switch on the right hand side, the envelope was suddenly extended, and the traveler found himself sheltered beneath and impermeable tent.” The reader concluded: “Which was rather ingenious.”

  His gaze went to the wall. “But here’s a violin with its bow,” he continued. “One could, without compromising oneself, hang it alongside the dentist’s pincers and label it the same way. It’s interesting to know the opinion of today’s melomaniacs regarding that instrument, which renders the operator so pretentious and the listener so peevish.” And, standing up on tiptoe, he read—with some difficulty, because of the distance, the following commentary:

  “Musical instrument, which inflicted considerable damage on the youth of ancient times. Maneuvered by a skilful hand, it was merely annoying; tortured by a mediocre performer, it could provoke attacks of epilepsy in the most phlegmatic. The instrument, like several others that were equally dangerous, is founded on the vibration of strings.” The young man added: “The curator of the museum has employed a certain method in the arrangement of objects. I can see another apparatus beside the violin that’s equally annoying.”

  “Damn!” said the doctor, who had considerable pretensions with regard to the article in question. “You’re very disrespectful of the game of chess.”

  “I agree with Gédéon,” said Terrier. “I would even add that the chessboard, which absorbs all the intellectual efforts of its fanatics, offers very great dangers. I don’t mean for you, Antius, who have only ever been a mediocre player.”

  “Mediocre,” he doctor replied, dryly, “is not the word I’d use.”

  “Great God!” cried Gédéon, suddenly, raising his arms to the heavens and giving signs of extreme agitation. “It’s her!”

  “Have you lost your mind? Is it necessary to administer a shower with this instrument?” asked Antius severely, pointing to an old watering-can hung on the wall and elevated to the rank of “artistic curio.”

  “It’s her, I tell you!” the young man cried, insistently, leaning over a large display case.

  “Who’s her?” asked the physicist, very intrigued.

  “The one who left me so often, in spite of the chain that bound her to my heart, who was my plank of salvation on bad days, who made the journey to the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux thirteen times over, for whose absence all three of us wept on the day when we set foot in the new world—it’s my old Toledo watch!” The young man was laughing and weeping at the same time.

  “I observe that you have a good heart,” Terrier remarked, “but you’re doubtless the victim of a hallucination.

  “Oh,” Gédéon replied, in an elegiac one, “if your chronometer had rendered you as much service, you’d recognize it after a separation of ten thousand years.”

  “He’s right, damn it,” said the doctor, who had leaned over the object. “I recognize that old crock, permanently deprived of a minute hand, which periodically made the journey to the Mont-de-Piété.”

  The young man, in whom joy was always manifest by some extravagance, started whirling on his heels like a dervish, but came to a sudden stop uttering a cry of pain, accompanied by a sequence of curses. In his rotation he had bumped into a gas-jet that rose up sadly in front of the wall, which bore a label on its stem on which two words were legible: Old lamp.

  “Moderate your delirium, or you’ll bump your head,” the professor advised, mildly.

  “Now he tells me—thanks!” the victim riposted.

  “As for your watch,” Antius observed, “it now enjoys a very well-deserved repose, and you ought to be more than a little proud to be contributing to the education of present generations, in the form of that old cheap clockwork.”

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nbsp; By this time the travelers had made a circuit of the immense room and had been able to ascertain that it contained varied specimens of the majority of scientific, industrial and domestic instruments of the ancient world—instruments now abandoned, either because the civilization of the present had adopted more advanced ones, or because the arts that they facilitated had undergone complete transformation.

  “I believe,” said Antius, for whom exactitude was a fundamental virtue, “that we would do well to return to the school. Our visit has been so interesting that the hours have flown by without our noticing.”

  The travelers left the gallery and went through the vestibule. As they passed through the entrance door, eleven successive chimes sounded overhead.

  The three men went across the courtyard.

  Suddenly, the professor, stopping his companions, pointed out an old Crampton Engine,34 which was standing in a corner and was only drawn to the attention of visitors by the two words: Rare specimen.

  “Are they making fun of us?” Gédéon asked.

  “How’s that?” asked Terrier.

  “Yesterday, I believe, as I was pronouncing a funeral oration for men of law worthy of figuring in collections of contemporary moral exemplars, there was a lawsuit concerning railways in progress at the Palais de Justice.”

  “Yes,” the professor replied, “but the machines of the Central African railways us an electromotive system. It’s as if you’d said: I had a watch, whose sand still exists.”

  Stunned by the argument, the young man remained silent.

  As they went into the courtyard of the school, the strangers ran into the schoolmaster coming to find them.

  “Messieurs,” he said, “I’m bringing you an invitation to dinner tomorrow evening, at Monsieur Dryon’s house.”

  The travelers thanked their generous host.

  “The illustrious agronomist, who’s coming back for the conference,” Herber continued, “called me this morning. He’ll only be in Paris for forty-eight hours. The day after tomorrow, his aerial transport, the Arago, will launch forth into the air again.”

  The parlor bell rang.

  The four men headed for the dining room, where Madame Herber was waiting for them, giving her final instructions.

  After greeting the young woman, the guests sat down at the table.

  The visit to the museum of antiquities became the topic of conversation. The subject was treated prudently by the two scientists, and Gédéon, carefully monitored by his uncle, did not commit any stupidity.

  “Messieurs,” Herber said, “you have been able to observe how defective our ancestors’ inventions were, especially with regard to travel, as that old steam engine in the front courtyard testifies. What inferiority, by comparison with our balloons, some of which, like the Arago, devour twenty leagues an hour. At the end of the 20th century, it took a fortnight to reach the heart of Africa, but today, Monsieur Dryon can set foot on the shore of Lake Tanganyika after a twenty-four hour journey.”

  “The opulent landowner has doubtless come to spent the fine season in his magnificent Palais in the Place des États?” queried Madame Herber.

  “No, Jeanne,” the schoolmaster replied. “In spite of the fatigues of the Congress, Monsieur Dryon intends to leave on Friday for his estates.”

  “You say, my dear Master,” Antius put in, “that your illustrious friend has come for a Congress.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Is that a political Congress?”

  “Yes, the great Congress of the United States of Europe.”

  “Where is it held?” Antius asked.

  “In Constantinople,” Herber replied, surprised by the question.

  “In Constantinople!” the doctor exclaimed.

  “Yes, Messieurs—the General Congress has been held in that city every year for five centuries. Every State has its own individual Congress, in which local issues are considered, approximately a month before the great Congress, but all governmental questions are dealt with in the capital of the old continent.”

  The doctor and the physicist, mute with astonishment, dared not ask about the political commotions that had transformed Europe in the course of ten centuries.”

  The young man came to their aid, rather cleverly. “My dear Master,” he said to Herber, “I’d be very glad to know the circumstances that led the European nations to an understanding that could not have been foreseen in ancient times. I confess that, on many historical points, I only possess rather vague notions, and that my education requires completion in that respect.”

  “I can briefly remind you of the general causes of the major events, my young friend. You know that, by the end of the 20th century, ballistics had made such progress, and the apparatus of extermination had become so murderous, that governments could only envisage the frightful responsibilities of war with terror. In that epoch, a few international differences put to arbitration having produced excellent results, the idea of disarmament gradually took hold.

  “The ground was thus prepared when a providential circumstance permitted the permanent assurance of general peace. Turkey, which had been the firebrand of European discord for two centuries, had just been neutralized. Suddenly, a simple idea of absolute efficacy became clear. It was understood that no political agitation would be possible in Europe if the nations had an army and a fleet equipped at common expense at Constantinople, in the most favorable strategic position in the world, ready to descend like lightning on anyone who attempted to disturb the peace.

  “Radical as it seemed to our ancestors, the measure, it must be said in their honor, encountered few adversaries, who eventually ended up accepting the general opinion. After five years of deliberation, they set to work. Two years later, a formidable European army occupied Turkey, charged with policing the old continent.

  “The result was admirable. General disarmament was carried out in a matter of months. For thirty years, the harmony was so perfect that, with a common accord, the federal army was reduced by half. After a further period of absolute tranquility, it was further diminished in the same proportion, and so on, with the result that, by the end of the 22nd century, the police force changed with maintaining the security of Europe consisted of a few hundred mariners and soldiers, whose maneuvers were reduced to the fanatical practice of angling on the shores of the Bosphorus. As no one gave any thought to filling the gaps that old age or illness produced in that venerable troop, it gradually faded away without anyone noticing its disappearance.

  “All international questions continued to be settled by independent tribunals, and it became unthinkable that the interested parties, even in the epoch when no threat hung over their heads, might seek to defy the decision of the arbitrators. People eventually got into the habit of regarding Constantinople as the true capital of Europe, and an annual Congress designed to tighten the bonds of amity that already united all its peoples was instituted there, which still function today. That, Messieurs, is how the United States of Europe were founded.

  “Profound harmony, unshakable peace and the reciprocal esteem and sympathy of nations, were not the only benefits that resulted from that great peaceful revolution. Five million men were returned to agriculture, industry, maritime commerce, the arts and science. Labor increased in a formidable proportion, and a considerable overflow of wellbeing expanded through the western world. Taxes were reduced everywhere, in spite of the extraordinary development of major projects of public utility and the enormous momentum given to public education.

  “Libraries, laboratories, museums and schools multiplied infinitely, and there was soon no township in the remotest corners of Europe that was not proud of its local academy, in which all scientific, literary, economic and industrial questions were treated in turn. Such are, my young friend, the opinions of the contemporary historical school of the principal events that prepared and determined the United States of Europe.”

  XXIII. The Pont Neuf. Meteorological Questions.

  The Gulf Str
eam

  A few minutes later, the diners left the table. Herber, retained by his duties, wished his friends well and left, heading for the interior buildings. After having bid farewell to their gracious hostess, Antius and his companions went out in their turn.

  Five minutes later, the travelers, gathered at the foot of the school’s monumental staircase, conferred to determine which way to go.

  “Let’s go down to the river,” Gédéon proposed. “We’ll be nearly in the center of the city, and it will be easy to make a decision from there.”

  “You reason like Pythagoras,” said Terrier.

  Antius nodded his head, and the three men set off on the lawn of the plaza, which they crossed in a straight line.

  They had taken a hundred paces when a gigantic shadow, advancing toward them with lightning rapidity, made them recoil instinctively.

  “It’s only a balloon,” said the young man, calmly, pointing at an aerostat that was cleaving the air above their heads, whose projected shadow was now running over the crowns of the trees. “By the way,” he added, addressing the physicist, “I wouldn’t be sorry to be able to put one over on the scientists of old.”

  “In what way?” asked the professor, for whom that proposition, in view of the scientific abilities of its author, seemed the height of extravagance.”

  “I believe, having heard you say so, that a thousand years ago, only bodies lighter than air could be maintained in the atmosphere.”

  “I’ve never affirmed such an absurdity,” the professor declared.

  “In that case, I must have been dreaming,” admitted the young man, philosophically, who willingly gave in on questions of that sort.

  “Or, rather, you’re lending an absurd meaning to the enunciation of a principle that no one had ever contested.”