On the Brink of the World's End

by Brian Stableford

  6 Author’s note: “My uncle is preparing a voluminous Work on the vapors that compose the different layers or regions of the atmosphere, as will be seen at the end of this Book.”

  7 Author’s note: “The day after his experiment at the Champ-du-Mars, Monsieur Blanchard wrote that he had experienced a very violent desire to go to sleep; that proves that my poor uncle is worthy of faith, and that Monsieur Blanchard found himself in the same region in which my poor uncle went to sleep.” Jean-Pierre Blanchard (1753-1809), who made his first flight in a hydrogen balloon launched from the Champ de Mars on 2 March 1784, went on to become a very enthusiastic balloonist, making a profession as a showman, touring America as well as Europe, and eventually dying in a fall.

  8 Author’s note: “Scholars will not fail to object to me that the difference between the height of the inhabitants of the Moon and those of Earth is not in proportion to the difference of the diameters of the two planets; so much the worse for those who find geometrical relationships everywhere. But my uncle has seen; there is no reply to that.”

  9 Author’s note: “The first Balloon that rose up from Paris came down in Gonesse. People made fun of the alarm that its fall caused that population of bakers, but the bakers of Gonesse can be excused for a lack of understanding of Physics, since one sees Physicists in Paris who are so scholarly in their lack of understanding of bakery. That is what my good friend César Bucquet, former miller of the Hôtel-Dieu, has demonstrated in his observations on that Art.” The balloon that came down in Gonesse in August 1783 was the Montgolfiers’; there is now a street there named after them. César Buquet—or, more commonly, Bucquet—published numerous books, including a manual of milling and mill-construction, although a collection of Obervations intéressantes et amusantes credited to his wisdom and issued in 1783 by the same publisher who issued Dulaure’s booklet, appears to have been written by Edme Beguillet.

  10 Author’s note: “There was a man in London who made a brilliant fortune by swallowing daggers and razors.”

  11 Author’s note: “An Academy has proposed the discovery of an instrument that can enable its bearer to see clearly in the dark, a very useful discovery when the habit of making candles has been lost.”

  12 Author’s note: “If the Public cared to take the trouble to look closely at the great enterprises proposed by subscription, they would find that the secret agents of the great machine are either an ardent and learned but unknown young Physicist, an estimable but poor Writer, or a clever but unknown young Geographer. At the head of these people, always poorly paid, they will find thereafter a polished ignoramus devoid of modesty and delicacy.”

  13 Author’s note: “If my uncle had read the book of La Verité in two volumes, and that of Le Tableau naturel des rapports qui existent entre Dieu, l’Homme et l’Univers, etc., also in two volumes, he would have noticed that that renewed science of the Greeks and Egyptians is beginning to be reintroduced into France.” Although it is not the only possible contender, the first reference might be to La Verité sortant du puits heretique (1753), which bears the unlikely signature Cosmocole Philovite. The other work cited appears in several secondary lists as a text dealing with Freemasonry; the citation in a 1786 book of Observations sure la franc-maçonnerie, le martinisme, etc. is not the only one to cite it immediately after a text entitled Des Erreurs & de la Vérité, which suggests that Dulaure might have accidentally abridged the earlier title, had he found it in an earlier list of a similar sort.

  14 Author’s note: “In order to be more laconic I have translated the words of the Lunar idiom into equivalents in the French language. For instance, a man who lives at the expense of public credulity, who knows nothing and undertakes everything, who obtains by importunity that which ought to be the recompense of merit, who does nothing but solicit, I have called a “man of projects, a schemer.” A priest who fulfils no other function than that of transporting the pleasure of his coquetry and insipidity to the homes of all the priestesses I have called an “abbé,” and so on. [Note by my poor uncle.]”

  15 Author’s note: “It is evident that my poor uncle was scarcely well-informed about the mores of his own country; he had not taken the trouble to observe Paris. He thought he was at the center of the capital when he was at the Luxembourg, in the midst of a committee of bourgeois in full dress, where he played politics all afternoon. It is excusable not to know one’s own country, and praiseworthy to speak well of it; too many people slander it. For instance, a satirical poet has dared to say of elegant abbés: ‘All radiant with vice, from boudoir to boudoir, the benefits flow.’”

  16 Author’s note: “Let people refrain from laughing at this means of steering aerostats; it is not as ridiculous as many others that have been proposed. In any case, this one enabled the voyage of my uncle, who had, in truth, neither money nor subscribers.”

  17 Author’s note: “In spite of the pour success of the Lyon aerostat, all the extravagances that a stupid admiration can produce were seen after its fall. One individual got down from his horse, invited the aerial voyagers to mount up and led them away on foot, bridle in hand. Another took of his cloak to cover them. There was a deep and muddy ditch on the rod; several citizens bent down in the ditch and invited another aerial voyager to pass over their backs. Exclamations accompanied their triumphal entry; a spectacle was recommenced for them, people sang to them, they were crowned with laurels, feasts were held in their honor. What service had they rendered their fatherland, those heroes? What fine deeds had they done? A balloon had lifted them up, and their own weight had immediately brought it down to earth.” Seven people took off from Lyon in a Montgolfier balloon called Le Flesselles on 17 January 1784. More than 100,000 people were said to have watched the ascent, but the balloon tore when it reached 3,000 feet and made a rapid descent, although the passengers escaped without serious injury. A commemorative medal was struck bearing the legend: Que ne peut le Génie [What can Genius not achieve?

  18 Author’s note: “At the moment when the Lyon aerostat rose up, a vigorous aeromane ran forward, climbed up to the gallery and forced the modern Argonauts to accept him for their travelling companion. Another, more furious, presented himself with two pistols, ready to kill anyone who wanted to go down. In Paris, when Monsieur Blanchard was ready to rise from the Champ-de-Mars, a young fanatic threw himself at the nacelle and attached himself to it so forcefully that several arms could not tear him away. The shocks that the machine experienced broke its wings and allowed a great deal of inflammable air to escape. Finally, he yielded to force and was taken away, in despair not to have been able to participate in the glory of one of our aerostaticians by subscription.”

  Joseph Méry: Future Paris

  (1854)

  Paris will only truly be Paris in the twentieth century.

  One can demolish the old Medieval city, pierce new streets, combine palaces with hyphens, build kilometers of boutiques, plant promenades, invent rivers and hollow out artificial ponds, but Paris, in spite of these fortunate masonic revolutions, will still remain the rainy city, the somber city, the muddy city, the city embarrassed by Henri IV and Boileau.

  It necessary, in the end, to render Paris habitable, and above all to institute the divorce of man and the umbrella.

  Man was not born to open and close an umbrella until he dies.

  The rain has been, since Pharamond was elected under a pavois—an umbrella19—the jailer of Parisians. Every Parisian is condemned from birth by the rain to ten years in prison.

  That has lasted for fourteen centuries.

  There have been insurgencies against all tyrannies and they have all been overturned; only two tyrannies still remain: rain and the porter.

  “It is the sun of Austerlitz,” Napoléon said, several times. Those six words give pause for reflection. There was, therefore, sunshine at Austerlitz, a battle fought on the second of December in the north

  We also read, in the history books: “It was a beautiful spectacle: the cuirassiers of
Caulaincourt hurling themselves upon the great redoubt, defended by sixty cannons, at the same moment the sun, veiled since the morning, made breastplates of the cavalrymen resplendent.”

  That scene occurred in the month of September, at Borodino, near Moscow, in a land where the sun is only known by reputation, which has obliged all the tsars, since Peter the Great, always to gaze eastwards, like icy Tantaluses.

  Austerlitz, Borodino and Moscow thus prove to us that there is an ingenious method for obtaining sunlight, even in midwinter, even in the heart of the north.

  It is a matter of firing numerous cannons.

  On the second of December 1805 and the seventh of September 1812, Austerlitz and Borodino would have kept their eternal cupola of rainy mist; fortunately, France passed that way, fired a few thousand cannon shots, and showed the sun to the bewildered Muscovites.

  The Russian general Pyotr Bagration, wounded on the great redoubt, pronounced as he fell these memorable words: I die content; I have seen the sun!” He owed that joy to us.

  Will these great historic examples be wasted for the future of Paris? No. The remedy will at first be greeted as a paradox; then it will have the fate of all paradoxes; it will emerge from is well, mirror in hand.

  The future aediles, exonerated of loans of fifty million, will one day erect twelve cyclopean towers, one per arrondissement: towers a hundred meters high, which will already be superb as viewpoints. The summit of each tower will be equipped with a circular battery of a hundred cannons, and if the slightest could rises at any of the cardinal points, fire away!

  The cloud will hold its assembly somewhere other than the Portes Saint-Martin or Saint-Denis; it will burst over the countryside, and fecundate gardens; no trace of it will ever again be seen over Paris.

  It is war declared against the enemies of the air.

  Too bad for the merchants of umbrellas, successors of Pharamond; they will change métier, like coaching inns and postillions.

  Parisians will say every day, as they pass the Vendôme column with dry feet: “There is the sun of Austerlitz! Three hundred and sixty-five suns of Austerlitz per year!

  The merchants of umbrellas can sell parasols, if they do not want to change their estate.

  But that is not the only service that the twelve towers might render the twelve arrondissements.

  Under the last years of the idle reign of Louis Philippe, one saw on the Place du Carrousel a beacon that resembled a miniature sun. A simple trial: the modest germ of something immense that will one day—which is to say, one night—be resplendent over the twenty thousand roofs of the capital.

  The luminous power of the beacon of the Carrousel will be multiplied a hundred fold, ten times that if necessary; twelve suns of electric flame will rotate at the summits of the twelve imbrifuginous towers, and every evening the daylight will be reignited after sunset; the odious night, nox atra, that mother of crimes, accomplice of thieves and murderers, will be suppressed.

  It will be possible to see clearly at midnight.

  No more drunken patrols; no more wheezing sentinels; no more rounds; no more gas explosions; no more national guard....

  What benefits!

  Let us pursue this work of the future.

  Another paradox: there are no fountains in Paris. The naiad who believes that the waves sculpted by Jean Goujon belong to her, fluctus credidit esse suos, is mistaken.

  A naiad is obliged by her profession to make water clear, and the water-carriers only fish in troubled waters in the fountains of Paris.

  How is it that Paris, an essentially academic city, a city that imitates the Romans in comedies, tragedies, triumphal arches, votive columns, temples and popular sedition to such an extent that Paris would have lived for fourteen centuries with its arms crossed if Rome had not invented columns, tragedies, battles, Places Vendôme, Chambre des Députés, full cisterns, geniuses suspended on the right foot, Renown, circuses, the seditions of the forum, Brutuses, Cassiuses, civil wars. Alexandrine verses, advocates, triumphal arches, porters, Academicians, Champs-de-Mars, insulting slaves, rostral columns, garden statues, liberated women and saturnalia…how is it, I repeat, that Paris has forgotten aqueducts of spring-water in its innumerable imitations?

  Aqueducts! What a lacuna!

  The Romans had a river too, a yellow river like the Seine; they could have caused specimens of the unfiltered Tiber to run through artificial fountains, but their aediles had too much respect for the lips of the sovereign people. They constructed, at enormous expense, infinite successions of monumental lines, which brought water to the sovereign people over triumphal arches, according to Chateaubriand’s beautiful expression.

  As soon as a spring of superior quality was discovered, an Eau Laffite, a Naiad Chambertin, like virgin water, that liquid treasure was captured, and dispatched to the thirsty lips of the Romans across thirty kilometers of aqueducts.

  Too bad for the merchants of adulterated Falernian, or the ungodly substance baptized lustral water! The people, in love with the new naiad, intoxicated themselves in a hydraulic orgy, and deserted the altars of the false Bacchuses, crowned with ivy, at the corn-stalk crossroads.

  The Parisian imitation will be belated, but it will come.

  Paris will have serious fountains, like the Barcaccia, the Trevi and the Piazza Navona.

  It is time that water was drunk in the département of the Seine.

  The false Bacchus has done enough harm to the lovers of liquefied campeachy.20

  The Seine, like the Tiber, is a purveyor of bathing stations or a school of natation. It does not flow in order to slake the thirst of human throats; if one saw in a solar microscope the infamous atoms it ferries, one would die of thirst rather than drink a glass of its water.

  In the Midi, the flavorsome bounty of spring water renders people sober and spares them the vice of drunkenness.

  The hideous locution pourboire,21 passed into the mores of the North, would cause a southern worker to wilt, if he made use of it. One does not fortify oneself there with alcoholized campeachy.

  In Rome, the athletes drank water; Milo of Crotona never went into a wine-merchant’s shop, and he could stun a bull with a blow of his fist. If we think that hyperbole, let us say a calf, and that is still not bad.

  The hills surrounding Paris are immense reservoirs, which are only awaiting aqueducts and joint-stock companies to inundate our fountains with virgin naiads. They will come from the heights of Meudon, Franconville, Ermont, Saint-Leu-Taverny and all the other hills and petty mountains neighboring Paris, as the heights of Soratte and Tibur neighbored Rome at an almost equal distance.

  Providence never places reservoirs too far distant from thirsty lips, having said: Give to them who are thirsty to drink. That order was not addressed to wine-merchants.

  That same good Providence watches over Paris with a thoroughly maternal care, and its vigilance increases as the paths of circulation are encumbered with wheels, horses and pedestrians.

  Another thing that the future promises

  What we see today on our boulevards cannot last long; it imposes too many cares on Providence, the economical guardian of public cobblestones and macadam. Choose a point of observation on the boulevard—for example, the area that separates the Passage Jouffroy from the Passage des Panoramas. One bears witness, for hours on end, to a strange spectacle.

  In the middle roll, march, fly and gallop, in a frightful pell-mell, fiacres, omnibuses, coupés, citizens, milords, rigs, handcarts, big carts, diligences, tilburys, artillery trains, and every machine ever invented for breaking cobblestones, crushing toes, killing horses, deafening ears and stopping traffic.

  In that turbulence, hardy pedestrians, on tiptoe, umbrellas in hand, fight madly, in greater danger than Turks during a sortie from Silistra.22

  On the threshold of the passages men and women, as immobile as the shades of the Styx, ripae ulterioris amore,23 await the least dangerous moment traverse the boulevard bristling with perils: that Strait of
Magellan where the mobile reefs cross paths; that long archipelago of harnessed Cyclades pursuing travelers; that dark gulf in which two eyes are insufficient to see Charybdis to the left and Scylla to the right.

  And we are still in the first epoch of Aurelian Paris! The Appian Way has not yet planted its two boundary markers on the two seas. Come a complete railway, merely come the year 1854, and we shall see pedestrians who are too prudent or pusillanimous retained for entire days on one of the two sides of the boulevard, without finding a faint momentary clearing to promise them a fortunate crossing.

  The shades of the Styx sometimes waited for a century to pass over to the other side, but they had the patience that death and the absence of business bring. The day that sees a distraction of Providence over that section of the boulevard will also see a proposal burst forth from the bosom of the Parisian aediles. A municipal voice will say: “Since bridges are thrown over dead rivers, it is necessary to throw them over living rivers.”

  Perhaps shareholders will come together to build those bridges at their expense, and they will make fortunes if they are authorized.

  The first bridge, which will serve as a model, will be constructed between the Passages Jouffroy and les Panoramas, at the confluence of two enormous cities, one of which always has urgent business in the other.

  That bridge will have a colossal arch; people will cross it by mounting two broad staircases; it will be surmounted by a covered gallery with restaurants, cafes and reading rooms, with windows opening on to the two horizons of the boulevard, The success of the first bridge will determine other shareholders to operate at other points.