by Paul Vibert
For a long time, all these ideas had been running confusedly around my brain, muffled by time, that great thinner, as Émile Girardin130 said, if I’m not mistaken, when a series of discoveries, events or petty facts arrived to galvanize those old memories and give me hope that we might finally arrive at a solution and possess a house of flesh and bone.
The concept is audacious; can it be realized?
Now, quite sincerely, I’m beginning to believe so, although there’s obviously a lot still to do in that regard.
It’s quite evident that there can never be any question of possessing a vast apartment, but merely a small residence, warm and comfortable, since it will change location at will and humans will have thus resolved the problem of the portable house and outdone the snail and the whelk as well as the tortoise.
Anyway, listen to me for two minutes and you’ll see whether my project can be easily realized. It’s obvious that if I want to travel on land, I’ll establish my little residence in the stomach of an elephant, where there is space, and not in the belly, which would be absurd, since there’s nothing there but the interminable corridors of the intestines and bowels, while I’ll establish it in the stomach of a whale if I want to undertake a sea voyage. In that case, I’d possess a little submarine of flesh and bone, just like good old Jonah—see the Bible, page, etc. It’s as simple as that.
I hear the benevolent reader stopping me at this point with a triumphant and authoritarian gesture and saying to me: “Pardon me, I don’t see how you will have the wherewithal to take up residence in these animals, even narrowly, especially if you have a family, with our wife and mother-in-law, not to mention the kids.”
Don’t be so impatient; I’ve resolved the difficulty, and it’s exactly that of which I’m so proud. First of all, by way of preparation, I submit my young elephant, in a glass-stable, or my young whale, in a pool-aquarium, to the well-known influence of violent radiation, and after six months I possess a pachyderm or a whale five or six times as large as their ordinary peers, which will ensure that I immediately have in their stomach a small residence into which an entire family will fit comfortably. But I understand that it would be disagreeable to live and sleep all in the same room, and if you have a mother-in-law who absolutely has to have a drawing-room, I also have a solution for that—two equally elegant solutions, in fact.
I can revive the celebrated procedure of the king rat, the prosthetic graft, and in two elephants or whales together, and then, when the graft has been made, I only have to make a small communicating incision—and, as I have, of course, used animals subjected to the action of violet rays, I will then be in possession of a truly comfortable little apartment.
The second procedure is equally simple, for it even does away with the aforementioned prosthetic graft; it is sufficient to select from the animals the young phenomena, Siamese twins, in conventional parlance, that are occasionally encountered; then, communication via the membrane between the two stomachs is not difficult to establish, very reminiscent of the famous bellows that links the carriages of express trains.
Finally, for the benefit of ladies, I will say that all eaux de toilette and others will be naturally evacuated via the pylorus into the intestines—and that ingenious application of mains drainage even had the advantage of nourishing the animal, which no longer has any need to eat by means of its mouth, and thus leaves you a stomach that is free and tidy.
It is very easy to tame it by striking it, and it will let you enter and leave at will via the esophagus, by opening its pretty pink mouth, which is like the antechamber of your apartment, prior to the corridor of the esophagus. With the two united or Siamese animals you even have the possibility of having two entrances, one for the master and one for the servants! Isn’t that practical and marvelous?
With the result that you can rapidly, without expense, in total security, in the warm and with no fear of draughts, travel the earth over land and sea.
That, then, is the house of flesh and bone of which I dream and which I am in the process of realizing. At this moment I am raising two Siamese-twin elephants in my stable-hothouse with violet glass. I hope that they will soon be half as large as Notre-Dame, or the Opéra. Then there will be room in their two stomachs, and before setting off to go around the world, I shall invite you to the inauguration, the ball and the house-warming party in by apartment of flesh and bone. To avoid crowding, though, especially in the corridor of the esophagus, I will invite you in series.
My elephants, well-dressed, will delicately seize my guests with their trunks and introduce them of their own accord into the antechamber—which is to say, into their pretty pink young pachydermal mouths, lit for the occasion by small electric lamps.
You will see that it’s a charming effect; one might believe that one were in a fairy grotto made of coral.
Ladies who are afraid will remain at the door, and the elephant-houses will play dominoes with them.
Now, let anyone say that my idea is not a stroke of genius. Yes, let someone say that to my face.
As I’m generous and want to profit all rich people by researching a new means of locomotion, original and unpublished, I haven’t taken out a patent. But I have a park of young Siamese-twin elephants in the Upper Ubangi, and an aquarium of young Siamese-twin whales in the Kerguelen Isles, and I am at the disposal of all persons who need information as to the price of purchase, the upkeep of the animals, etc., only too happy to have been able to create, invent, realize and—who knows?—perhaps one day to popularize and vulgarize, portative houses of flesh and bone that walk of their own accord.
You only have to ask!
The Danger of Certain Mineral Waters
A curious example. How an American woman was saved.
For she’s made of stone
(popular song)
Two years ago, on returning from my electoral campaign in Algiers, as I was exhausted and dead on my feet, I decided to take a few days rest in the Midi, and one morning, in company with my wife, I visited the famous Pont du Gard.
By a happy chance, at the very foot of the celebrated Roman aqueduct, we had the good fortune to meet one of my old Yankee friends, who, knowing that I was in Africa, was tranquilly touring the Midi while awaiting my return to Paris.
After the initial effusions, we began a serious examination of the bridge and—something worthy of note—the dog from the nearby restaurant, without being invited and without knowing us, benevolently came to serve as our guide and show us the famous upper passage, with the sole objective of dragging us thereafter into his master’s establishment.
I salute in passing the memory of that admirable-trained tracker dog, which lacked nothing but speech.
Thus, we had started out along the ancient superior channel, which gave passage to the waters and were remarking, with cries of both surprise and admiration, how the slow work of the waters had partly blocked and obstructed the large square channel, to the point of hardly leaving room for a man to pass, and how the deposits of phosphate stone,131 a material as geological as it was solid, had remained there, intact and indestructible, for many centuries.
My young American friend felt, scraped and even licked these sedimentary deposits with a sort of feverish precipitation, his eyes haggard, and we all stopped anxiously to stare at him, with the same thought: he’s mad!
He was joking, to some extent. He was no longer paying attention to us. Suddenly, he stood up straight, radiant with joy, as if transfigured, and shouted in a fit of delirious satisfaction that is impossible to describe: “Saved! She’s saved!”
And without saying any more, he ran like a madman down the little crumbling stone stairway that led to the famous aqueduct, at the risk of broken bones, and disappeared in the direction of the railway station, which was ten minutes away.
When we arrived at the aforementioned station, we learned that he had jumped on to a train that was just leaving, and had shouted to a porter: “Tell my friends that I’m going straight back to A
merica and that I’ll write to them from New York.”
It was Wednesday; I thought that he would be unable to leave from Le Havre until Saturday, unless he went via England—but that would not have gained him much time, and I told myself that it would be a good three weeks, perhaps a month, to wait before having news of him.
What a cruel wait—as cruel as it as enigmatic! My young friend was thoughtful, serious and intelligent, and yet he had seemed to us to all to be quite mad during that unforgettable morning spent in the narrow channel of the Pont du Gard.
Finally, six days later, I received the following curious letter from him:
Milwaukee (Wisconsin)
U.S.A. June 13, 1898.
My dear friend,
Madame Vibert, on seeing me run to the Pont du Gard station, must have taken me for a madman. Fortunately, it was not so—only that the sight of those deposits of chalk in the narrow channel of the Pont du Gard had been a sudden revelation for me.
You know that our water is often poor in the United States. We don’t always have Chamberland filters to hand,132 or the rubber is sometimes worn, and we drink water that contains a solution of calcareous matter in large concentration.
Now, you know my profound affection for my poor mother, who has been afflicted for many years by a mysterious and incurable malady that is manifest in intolerable stomach aches and, curiously, by an abnormal increase in weight entirely out of proportion to her modest plumpness. Can you imagine that my mother presently weighs 391 kilos—yes, you read that correctly; three hundred and ninety-one kilos, not counting fractions.
On seeing the calcareous deposits on the Pont du Gard I said to myself: “That’s it! Thanks to our bad water, my mother must have stone—which is to say, calcareous deposits—lining her stomach and intestine.” All the more so because I remember hearing her say on several occasions, while smiling sadly: “My dear Will, I have, as you say in that horrible Paris argot, a wooden mouth, although I haven’t eaten to much salmon. I haven’t been feasting at all.”
Alas, it wasn’t a wooden mouth but a stony one that she had.
Now that I know what’s wrong with her, and I know why she is so heavy that she can no longer weak, or even stand up, I’m full of hope. I’ve spoken to the physicians about solvents, but they told me that the remedy was worse than the disease, producing ulcers, and for the moment we’re sticking to methodical but violent massage, in the firm hope of succeeding in breaking up the layers of chalk lining the interior of her body, and ending up unblocking her digestive conduits entirely.
I’ll keep you up to date.
Yours,
Will
I still remained quite perplexed, and anxious for my poor friend—and even more so for his mother—in the face of the announcement of this news and the strange malady. Seven more weeks had passed when I received the following missive:
Victory, my dear friend—my worthy mother is saved, cured, as alert and frisky as her daughters, and this is how: the expected break-up did not happen, and Röntgen rays had not revealed any cracks in the stone tubes inside her when I persuaded her, recently, to take a ride into the country in a large carriage, with my sisters, in order to distract her a little. On a hillside road, the horses became alarmed and bolted. My mother, my three sisters, Kate, Maud and Rita, whom you know well, the carriage, the two horses and the coachman tumbled down the slope from top to bottom.
What a mess, my friend! Kate had a broken leg, but it has been set, and my mother was saved—doubly saved. Can you imagine that, during her fall, all the calcareous substances that were obstructing her stomach and intestines were broken up, and with the aid of two or three good doses of medicine,133 she had evacuated all the pieces in five days.
A week ago my mother still weight 397 kilos; today, she weighs 49.5—yes, you heard me right; less than a hundred pounds. She is supple, agile, can ride a horse or a bicycle, and looks like her daughters’ older sister.
Needless to say, we are eternally grateful to you and your wife, for it was you who revealed all to me, by showing me the calcareous deposits on the Pont du Gard. But what a curious malady, all the same, old chap—and how necessary it is to pay attention to the mineral waters that are mistakenly drunk across the United Sates.
Ever yours,
Will
I immediately cabled him:
Congratulations; we all embrace you effusively. Put groundsel cataplasms on Kate’s leg. Your thanks ought to be addressed to the dog at the Pont du Gard restaurant, which was our cicerone, and I have passed them on by telephone.
Antique Pronunciation
I. How the Egyptians pronounced the letter u.
Ou as old as the world.
How the pyramids furnished me with irrefutable proof.
I was still very young when the Comte de Pistois, an old friend of Balzac, Hetzel, the Comte de Grammont and the entire Republican Movement of the day, under the Empire, came one day to introduce the Marquis de la Lance—who had just published a sixty-copy edition of a fat volume entitled Mes petits papiers—to my father.134
What became of writers like the Marquis de Belloy,135 and other secretaries of Balzac whom my father knew? I have no idea. All dead, without a doubt, so long and short at the same time is a period of thirty-five to forty years in this base world.
Still, while yet a child, I read the various chapters of Mes petits papiers, written in a somewhat disconnected fashion with ken interest, and there was one in particular that made an impact on my inquisitive mind, avid for learning—as one sometimes is at ten years of age, when one has been brought up in a purely intellectual environment.
How was the letter u pronounced in antiquity, admitting that it existed? On that theme, passionate for a philologist, the Marquis de la Lance had written a short but substantial essay, and, without bothering overmuch as to whether U really existed or not, after having noted that it was not officially introduced into typography until 1629, by the Strasbourg printer Zeitner,136 he examined the old v-vowel and v-consonant of our Middle Ages and antiquity, and boldly concluded that antiquity had only ever known the pronunciation ou, and that u was, in consequence, quite recent, and did not, in fact, go back any further than the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Although some claim that the Greeks pronounced their upsilon i, like our y—the i-grec—many think that they pronounced it ou, like the Latins. Elsewhere, the Germans pronounce ou, the English ou and iou, so it seemed quite likely that u was a modern invention and very French.137
I confess that all this seemed curious and conclusive, and when, much later, I was able to establish myself that ou existed even in the Scandinavian countries, that it was never pronounced there in any other way than the Latin, and profound study had revealed to me that ou really was the only Latin pronunciation, according to the law of the twelve tables,138 the case seemed to be made.
I was still avid, however, to support my conviction with new proofs when the opportunity arose—but the current of life bore me away and I had not given the problem any thought for some time, when I has suddenly able, only a few years ago, to resolve it in an absolutely conclusive and definitive fashion.
The event was so unexpected and extraordinary, in certain respects, that I resolved to tell the story here, briefly.
All though overly dramatic from the political point of view, my journey to Algeria had given me a desire to spend some time in Egypt. I was finally able to do that, and the memory, still sharp, on my cousin Alphonse Hardon, the great engineer who actually built the Suez canal,139 under de Lesseps’ orders, caused me to be welcomed with open arms and opened all doors to me—even those most securely closed, including those to the great pyramids.
With great generosity, the Khedive advised me to dress as an Arab in order not to excites the susceptibilities—still a trifle fanatical—of the local inhabitants. He provided me with a reliable escort, drawn from among his own servants, and it was thus that I had the favor, unique in the world, not only of clim
bing the great pyramids but also of visiting the interior in detail, including the most insensate depths of that of Cheops.
It was there that I found, in the dust on the ground, human footprints several thousand years old, and I was able to collect enough grains of wheat dating back to the ancient kings of Memphis to sow a whole small field and eat excellent bread the following year. My only regret was not having been able to eat it with the arch-millenary mammonth-meat on the Siberian coast, as I have related in another chapter.
Soon, however, another discovery, more extraordinary still, brought my joy to its culmination—and truly, as I tell the story now, I remember as if I were there the hectic emotion that it caused me at the time.
By means of a host of tortuous, bizarre, steep paths, which forced us to draw a map as we advanced into the entrails of the megalithic monster in order not to be lost forever, lacking air, stifling and badly lit, we had descended much lower than ground level inside the great pyramid of Cheops. My companions, visibly weary—as I was—were beginning to manifest sentiments of terror in spite of the Khedive’s formal orders to protect me and follow me everywhere, even into the bosom of Hell.
Finally, we arrived at the bottom of a little circular room in the form of a cheese-cover, and in front of us, at our feet, on low pedestals of porphyry, were four sarcophagi: those of two important individuals and two children doubtless about ten years old.
I shall not go into detail regarding the religious precautions with which I opened the two larger ones, the first of which enclosed the mummy of a man and the other the mummy of a woman, whom I recognized immediately as a king and queen by the admirably conserved attributions painted on the sarcophagi.
When I opened the two small ones, with even more emotion, I found myself facing two superb mummies of ten-year-old girls—the royal couple’s children—each holding in her arms…guess what? I’ll give you any number…a superb Egyptian doll, as well-dressed as their little owners, in clothes that were doubtless very passé—no pun intended—but still intact.
