The Mysterious Fluid

by Paul Vibert

  By degrees, as always happens between more or less learned men—and my friend was very learned—the conversation touched all subjects, and ended up becoming both mystical and metaphysical.

  “Now,” said the Baron de Poullaouen, who was somewhat overexcited, although he had drunk less than anyone else—but he was thinking of the anniversary of the death of his mother, who had left him, still young, ten year earlier, who had died on the twenty-third—“I don’t ask for the opinion of my Parisian friend”—he pointed at me—“who is a miscreant, but yours, Abbé. Do you really believe in the general resurrection of all humankind at the end of time?”

  “Well, since we are informed to that effect by holy scripture….”

  “You’re answering like a Norman, Abbé. Do you really believe it, in your heart and your conscience?”

  “I do believe it.”

  “And you believe in the reunion of all humankind in the Valley of Jehosophat?”

  “Certainly.”

  “But there won’t be enough room on the banks of the Cedron to contain everyone, will there?”

  “Perhaps it’s figurative, and it would certainly be a miracle,” the Abbé opined, with an appearance of conviction, “but I believe it, for it is a great consolation for we poor mortals to be able to tell ourselves that we shall be able to find there all those we have loved on this earth of tears…”

  “That’s exactly what I often tell myself,” the Baron de Poullaouen replied, his eyes glued to the ceiling, in the vague and lost tone of a man pursuing a distant dream while wide awake…

  “Come on, Abbé,” I said, filling his glass to the brim with fine champagne—but as eleven o’clock chimed, the curé took his leave in order to supervise the preparations for midnight mass. The friends left, but, as it had been snowing for half an hour, the shivering Baron declared that he would not go to church but would stay by the fire to keep me company, while waiting the return of his servants—for whom he would provide the traditional Christmas goodwill offering of cooked meat washed down with a few mugs of cider.

  And tranquilly, having taken up his pipe again, as I had mine, with his feet in front of a fine bright fire, while the snow was falling in gusts outside and our dogs, huddling around the ancestral andirons for warmth, offered their crouched backs as warm footstools, we continued the interrupted conversation.

  “So, you heard the curé’s opinion: he believes in a general resurrection in the Valley of Jehosophat.”

  “It’s amusing—only, in order to recognize one another, it will be necessary to make sure one has all one’s bits and pieces.”

  “You’re always joking.”

  “Not at all—personally, I find it very poetic.”

  “That’s a concession, but if one is resurrected, it will presumably be as one was at the moment of one’s death?”

  “Evidently.”

  “That’s what I tell myself—so, when you have lost your wife, your lover or your fiancée in the full glow of her beauty, having died young, and if you meet her again, having died old, being ugly, shriveled and decrepit, she won’t recognize you, and will turn away from you for all eternity…”

  “It’s probable.”

  The Baron went pale, becoming as white as a sheet—except that his eyes were shining feverishly.

  Suddenly, I exclaimed: “You’ve been in love, then?”

  “Yes,” he murmured, “and my fiancée, a pure daughter of Armorica, as beautiful as the ancient Druid priestesses, with the hair and the golden sickle, was taken from me by the pitiless phthisis….”

  I understood my friend’s immense grief, and kept quiet—alas, that was and will be the eternal regret of my life…

  “Yes,” he murmured, in a whisper, “I will remain worthy of her”—and he fell back, collapsing in his armchair, his head slumped on his breast, as if lost in thought.

  Suddenly, the bell in the village church of Poullaouen began to ring, just as half past midnight chimed on the large wall-cock in the dining-room—but the noise arrived muffled, as if from a great distance, through the thickly-falling snow.

  Suddenly, at the same moment, as the sounds died away in the opaque space, a squall shook the entire château violently, causing the flame of the large lamp suspended above the old oak table to flicker, and even curving the flames in the hearth. The dogs, getting up on their forefeet, set back their heads and howled fatally, just as I saw the Baron de Poullaouen lift the stone of his ring swiftly to his lips…

  I launched myself forwards.

  Not a word, not a sign, not a movement; the poison in the ring was instantaneous.

  My poor dear friend would finally be able meet his fiancée in all the glory of his incomparable statuesque beauty, in the Valley of Jehosophat, on the day of the Last Judgment.

  And half an hour later, the old village curé came to say the prayers customary in Brittany over the body of a dead man.

  “Well, Abbé,” I said, with a sob in my voice, “we’ve killed him—you with your mysticism and I with my skepticism and joking,”

  “That’s true,” murmured the poor old curé, weeping.

  And involuntarily, but very quietly, I could not help thinking: All the same, for a man in love, my poor friend had a hard comedown.

  Why People Go Mad

  I. The imbroglio of the moment. Theaters and railways.

  Why there are so many lunatics in the asylums.

  The radical remedy.

  Today I want to tell you the terrible story of one of my friends, a poor fellow who was interned last week—which is today, buried alive in a madhouse for good, which is a hundred times sadder than brutal death.

  Never having left his province, which was in the median region of France, his schooling complete and finding himself an orphan in possession of a fairly tidy fortune, he decided to take up residence in Paris, to follow a course in diplomatic studies at the École and pursue research in the libraries on the inventor of the macaroni-mold, who was an Auvergnat, not an Italian. He saw that, rightly, as a patriotic goal, and expected to spend four or five years in Paris, waiting for and eventually reaching the age of thirty, when he would consider marrying.

  His first visit was to me, and he found me in the process of writing my ninety-first article to prove to my stubborn contemporaries that the twentieth century would begin at midnight on the first of January 1900, the nineteenth expiring on the thirty-first of December 1899 and not on the first of January 1901, as a pack of cretinous poseurs claim, without knowing why.144

  After have read my article he exclaimed: “But what you say here is obvious.”

  “It is obvious…but that doesn’t prevent it being necessary to write it, to demonstrate it to a mass of people who deny the daylight.”

  And he left, thoughtfully. The next day he came to see me again after coming out of the Institut, where he had heard a long and exhausting dissertation, badly read with a strong German or Alsatian accent on “Aberrations of the notion of time in the Middle Ages in the monastic mind”—which imagined that it was possible to stop its march by means of spells and incantations. He was so deep in thought that his state of mind was beginning to disturb me.

  I did not know how to react, and he told me himself: “Fortunately, we’re not so stupid today.”

  “Who knows?”

  Seeing that this perfectly natural reaction on my part had disturbed him, I offered him a half-pint of beer—my means did not permit me to offer him a whole pint—and he left, telling me that he intended to spend the afternoon of the following day at the Théâtre-Français, at the performance of Le Malade imaginaire ou la joie des médecins, a well-known repertory piece.145

  The day after the next, which was a Monday, he came into my apartment like a gust of wind and said: “A curious discovery, my dear chap—at home, morning finishes at noon, in accordance with the dictionary. Here, matinées146 last until seven o’clock at night in the theaters every Sunday and Thursday, and I’ve been invited to matinées in society.
How amusing that is.”

  “Yes,” I said, mechanically—and I had no more news of him for three months.

  One day, he wrote to me: “Come to see me, I’m laid up in bed, having received a sword-thrust in my ribs. I was invited to lunch by friends and arrived at four o’clock. They were bad-tempered, having been drinking beer after coffee while waiting for me. I timidly observed that, until seven in the evening, morning had not yet elapsed. The husband, a colonel, told me that I was mocking him; it was necessary to fight a duel. Does morning last until seven o’clock or not? I’m perplexed.”

  I flew round to see him, cared for him, did my best to console him, and made him understand that it was necessary not to confuse theatrical matinées with astronomical ones.

  Some time thereafter he was obliged to return to his homeland several times over, to see his sick mother, and when he said to a railway employee: “I don’t want to leave in the morning, but only in the evening,” the employee replied: “Of course—there’s a train at one forty-five in the evening.”

  He arrived tranquilly at the station after spending the evening with a friend, and there was no train. He quarreled with the employees, who threw him out, and he came to wake me up at three o’clock in the morning to ask my opinion of a matter he could no longer understand, since for him, the evening began at six o’clock.

  “No,” I told him, “on the railways, evening begins at noon, in broad daylight; you see, it’s necessary not to confuse railway time with astronomical time.”

  “Nor with theatrical time,” he replied, bitterly, and left, mortally saddened, to catch his train.

  When he arrived, his mother was dead, and after having buried her, the lawyer summoned him to hear his mother’s will read—she had left him her entire fortune—at two p.m.147

  Two p.m.? Was that morning, afternoon or evening? Yes, but was it morning as the theaters understand it, evening as the railways understand it, or afternoon as the world understands it—or might it be something else entirely? And he emitted a burst of strident and terrible laughter, which made the lawyer and his clerks tremble, and cried: “That’s clear! No notary—the monks of the Middle Ages were right; every day the theatres stop the progress of the sun, but the railways thumb their noses at them, at noon!”

  He was mad—irremediably mad—and that’s why I was obliged to take my poor friend to a asylum last week. And that, finally revealed, is the reason why there are so many madmen in lunatic asylums.

  Is there a radical remedy for this lamentable state of affairs?

  There are two.

  Firstly, bring together all the theaters and railway companies, to figure out whether afternoon is still afternoon, or whether it ought to become morning for the convenience of the former or evening for the pleasure of the latter. They could easily come to an agreement and have morning A and morning B for the theaters, and evening A for the railways and evening B for everyone else.

  Then, as it’s quite certain, on his occasion, that the theaters and the railways are the only guilty parties, with their baroque manner of dividing time, force them to maintain the lunatic asylums at their expense. That would lighten the budget by as much.

  Finally, the ministerial officers should be forced to pay for the poor lunatics to have treats every Sunday and Thursday, to teach them a lesson for having complicated the question with their p.m.s. All the more so as that is what caused my poor friend’s cup— sorry, I mean brain—to overflow.

  II. From Paris to the Antipodes.

  The deepest artesian well in the world.

  Is it necessary to go up or down? A cruel enigma.

  Everyone knows the legendary story of the poor old scientist who, wanting to measure the time of vision, stood at his window, then went downstairs four at a time and went out into the street to see whether he could still see himself. He invented a rapid stairway, then slid down a pole like firemen, and was still disappointed in his calculations, for he never arrived quickly enough to see himself.

  He wasted half his life in that sterile effort, and ended up dying utterly mad.

  Well, the story I want to tell you today is even sadder and much stranger, for he adventure happened, not to one of my friends, but to a man in whom I ended up being very interested. The unfortunate lunatic was an erudite man, a scientist of the first rank in some disciplines, and utterly inoffensive, but he had the most curious kind of madness and the strangest to study: he belonged to the category of inventors.

  Thus, one morning, let’s say ten years ago, a man presented himself at my home and asked to see me. Let’s say, for the sake of the story, that his name was Jean Dascare, with no particule, and say no more about it, for you’ll understand the sense of delicacy with respect to his memory that forbids me to reveal his real name.

  Not being a government minister, either past or future, being too Republican, I’m not in the habit of demanding that those who ask to see me make an appointment, I had him introduced immediately and the following brief dialogue was not long delayed in taking place between us:

  “My God, Monsieur, I beg our pardon for introducing myself personally, but here’s my card, and as I’ve heard talk of your father’s and your own works and I know you don’t believe at all in the Earth’s central fire, and have always demonstrated conclusively that it could not exist, I’ve come both to submit my plan to you and ask your advice.”

  “It’s true,” I said, “that I don’t believe in the possibility of the central fire; if it existed it would have blown us all up like rabbits a long time ago—or, rather, the Earth would no longer exist.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But go on—what’s this about?”

  “It’s quite simple. We’re at the end of 1889; the Exposition is about to close. I have eleven years before me. I want to prepare a very extraordinary attraction for the next Exposition, which will open the next century in 1900.”

  “A noble ambition!”

  “Isn’t it, Monsieur? I’m rich—I’ve earned a few million, thanks to my previous inventions—and I count on easily finding ten backers among my friends, and even among speculators enticed by my idea, by its boldness and novelty. In a word, I want to dig an artesian well, but a very deep one, which will traverse the Earth from one side to the other and terminate”—and the tapped my parquet with his foot—“down there, at the Antipodean island.”

  As one grows old one gets used to hearing and seeing all sorts of things, but I could not help starting in surprise.

  “I see that you take me for a madman. I expected that.”

  “Not at all, but I confess that astonishment….”

  “Let me continue. I’ve drawn up all my plans and estimates; from the moment you guarantee that there is no central fire, I’m sure of success. The well will be vast and broad, with a landing and a large hall every six hundred meters. A hydraulic apparatus will be installed in each of these halls to send an elevator down a further six hundred meters, and so on. It’s as simple as day. The hole is circular, vast—no broken drills, as in the boring of artesian wells. I’ve taken all my measures, made all my calculations; we’ll come out exactly on the Antipodean island south-west of New Zealand. It’s only a question of time and money, and I swear to you that it will be ready by 1900.”

  He left, but came back to see me frequently, and that devil of a man was so convincing, so well-armed, from the scientific point of view, that he ended up extracting a promise from me that I would accept the honorary presidency of the enterprise.

  Two years passed thus in preparations; he had a colossal factory installed at the gates of Paris, near the fortifications, and the work of piercing the globe, as he liked to call it, would soon beg. He was always inviting me to come along and strike the first ceremonious blow of the pick. Then, one morning, he came into my apartment like a gust of wind, his eyes bulging, and collapsed in an armchair.

  “Oh, my friend, I’m ruined.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s quite simp
le—your advice, quickly. I drill all the way to the center of the Earth, and we’re still going down, and I can send down my hammer-drills at will, like hydraulic force, through pipes.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Yes, but afterwards, in the second part of the drilling toward the Antipodes, am I still going down?”

  “No, you’re going up again.”

  Then, exploding in a surge of despair: “That’s what I’ve just told myself—but then my equipment is no longer going down; I’ll need power-pumps, and I’ll never obtain the necessary force.”

  “That’s true—but pierce the well from the two ends; with your exact calculations, the two shafts will surely meet in the center of the Earth.”

  “Yes, but I don’t have enough time. I’ll never be able transport the equipment and install a factory on the Antipodean island.” But, suddenly getting up, and striking his forehead like Galileo uttering E pur si muovo! he declared: “Yes, you’re right, science backs you up, but I no longer understand. Listen, I want to go down to the Antipodes, I don’t want to go up…to go up, when one is digging a well, although one’s still going down…you’re the one who’s mad…you…”

  “No, my poor friend, when one is traversing the Earth with a well, from the center onwards, one is going up.”

  He looked at me for a moment, giggling, his eyes haggard—and fled.

  After that day he abandoned his factory, and spent his millions having demonstrative spheres constructed and perforated, in order to see whether he would be going down or going up in these miniature wells.

  “But what about gravity?”

  “In this case, gravity is meaningless. Why would there be any at the center?”

  In the end, eight mortal years passed thus; then, suddenly, he had a glimmer of reason and came to find me to tell me that he had finally understood the cruel enigma, and that he would install a factory on the Antipodean island, as well as the one in Paris, in order to go down from both ends simultaneously.