We do not believe, thus far, that any connection can be made between the two evens, the bottle having landed on the Foch on the first of August and the cadaver discovered on the nineteenth; the state of the body does not indicate that it had been in the place where it was found for a long time.
At any rate, it is appropriate to wait for the revelation of what the manuscript contains to discover whether the two facts are correlated, and to be able to comment with any accuracy on the two events.
Le Peuple, which had long entertained a permanent petty quarrel with its rival, reproduced the same wireless dispatch the following day, making the following observations, which we also transcribe faithfully:
Our grave colleague Le Monde appears to have envisaged these facts from a slightly romantic angle and in a manner that might surprise the readers of that organ, ordinarily so pondered. On August the first, Aerobagne 32 was due, according to its official itinerary, to pass over the place where the body was found on the nineteenth; that would therefore imply that the cadaver had lain unperceived by the Tuaregs resident in the region for eighteen days. That is impossible. On the other hand, the leather bottle would most probably have been thrown into the sea from an aerial courier whose wireless telegraph had been damaged, or whose operation had been impeded by some breakdown. That is, it must be agreed, the sole means, already employed on many occasions, to make known the nature of an accident and explain a delay that might have caused alarm.
In any case, as our colleague says, very judiciously, it remains the case that only knowledge of the document contained in the leather bottle can provide the key to all this, which is only mysterious to minds inclined to the romantic. As for supposing that it is a matter of an attempted escape from an aerobagne, such a hypothesis is inadmissible; it would require a strong dose of credulity to add faith to it even for a minute. No one escapes from aerial prisons.
That commencement of polemic had no echo. Le Monde did not see fit to respond, and silence fell.
However, those few lines in an evening paper, repeated and commented on by a morning paper, were merely the prelude to events so formidable that they were seriously to threaten the situation of the Ministry and for the President of the Council only to owe the possibility of keeping his portfolio to a fortunate diversion.
Numerous aerial prisons are presently furrowing the great highways of the atmosphere. Germany has thirty, France has ten, England six and Japan two. Russia, having estimated that its desolate northern steppes are sufficient to its coercive needs, has not constructed any; it has kept the gibbet, that old national relic surviving so many other relics carried away by the revolutionary storm. China has also conserved its large terrestrial convict prisons, which cost so little to maintain, as well as the death penalty in multiple barbaric forms. Only the four great powers that we have just cited have aerial prisons; they confine their convicted criminals there, in a terrible isolation, among the clouds, and any escape attempt becomes a veritable suicide attempt. As is well-known, the other, less important powers, confide their convicts to one or other nations possessing the penitentiary regime of aerobagnes,98 on payment of an annual fee.
Economic factors were principally responsible for the adoption of aerial prisons. People will remember how difficult life was in the aftermath of the Great War, and what efforts were required to bring the land of so many impoverished nations back to full production, to reconstitute rural life and the decimated livestock. The crisis was fortunately overcome, thanks to the aid of colonies, which furnished large stocks of alimentary products.
France was the first nation to understand what advantages it could obtain from its colonial domain. Thus, it resolved not to encumber two of its finest possessions, New Caledonia and Guyana, with convicts and ex-convicts any longer. Rich territories had a more useful role to play than that of places of deportation for criminals. Once the principle was admitted, France entered resolutely into the path of realization, and created the aerobagnes.
Henceforth, murderers and malefactors of all categories were relegated to the air, in conditions that were severe but not at all barbaric. The milieu, moreover, was very healthy. The excellent results of the reform did not take long to be manifest. Escapes being impossible, the surveillance personnel could be reduced, and notable economies ensued. Finally rid of their sad guests, New Caledonia and Guyana attracted a numerous emigration composed of honest and hard-working elements, and developed in an extraordinary fashion in a few years.
Not only did the overseas convict prisons disappear, but also the majority of the penitentiary establishments in the metropolis. The Code was adjusted. As soon as a man is condemned to three years in prison, he has to purge his penalty aboard an aerobagne. In case of recidivism he can be relegated for life, in the capacity of a worker or a guard, either to an aerobagne or one of the terrestrial relay stations of the penitentiary system.
In France, the transportation of convicts to aerobagnes is effected in the following fashion. One morning, the gates of the jail open, an autocellular emerges, carrying the convict as far as the plain of the Crau or the marshes of Sologne. There are erected the posts of resupply, rival and departure for the aerobagnes; an aircraft takes aboard its cargo of convicts and transports them to an aerial penitentiary, which has descended in response to a wireless summons. Then the great metal bird resumes its slow course in the silence and solitude of the high altitudes.
The aerobagnes were and still are divided into two categories: those which receive convicts sentenced for a limited time and those that receive convicts sentenced to life imprisonment.
A national code fixes the itineraries of each nation’s aerial prisons. They must never descend below three thousand meters except to fly over their point of attachment or countries that are absolutely deserted.
The great couriers fly at five hundred meters, the sanatoria at a thousand meters, small biplanes lower down and aviettes even lower. It is with the aid of that code that Le Monde and Le Peuple were able to determine the nationality of the aerial prison that passed between the tenth and twentieth parallels at the level of Cap d’Arquin on the aforementioned date.
All the countries that have adopted the system of aerobagnes—with one exception—have made them places of detention in which the rigor of justice can be associated with humanitarian principles. Germany, faithful to its barbaric habits, has given them the physiognomy of frightful jails.
The convicts serving limited sentences who have returned from German aerial prisons maintain with regard to those places of misery a silence full of a terror with which their souls remain forever imprinted. They have the eyes of tracked beasts, fearful and suspicious. Those who seem ready to talk quickly become mute again. The little that one can get out of murmured confidences permits the imagination of frightful scenes happening aboard, and that the most frightful mental sufferings that history has known are surpassed in those hellish places.
Convicts released after three years of incarceration in German aerobagnes have been seen who have almost completely lost the power of speech and no longer employ anything more than a rudimentary language, and that incapacity of expression reveals the full depth of their intellectual degradation. What frightful memories, then, have troubled their mind?
So, Le Monde and Le Peuple had published two short articles regarding a leather bottle fallen on to the deck of a ship and a cadaver discovered in the sand of the desert. A week went by, and then events suddenly took on an exceptional gravity.
II. In which there is talk of revolution in the press,
a mob in the street and a young woman.
Five days after the publication of the item in Le Monde regarding the fall of the leather bottle Paris was revolutionized and astounded by an event without precedent in the history of that newspaper.
At about five o’clock in the evening, under the crude light of electric lamps, a swarm of newsvendors spread out through the city selling a special edition of the great daily paper. All newspapers ar
e cried in that fashion; it has become a necessity—from which, however, Le Monde had previously abstained, as much because it judged the number of its subscribers sufficient as out of pride, and because it was repelled by what it doubtless considered to be a vulgarity. Then, suddenly, that nobility went slumming, and the venerated title was uttered by the mouths of street-hawkers.
The reason for that circumstance had to be important—and, indeed, it was.
The words of a headline, in large letters, awoke all curiosities and caused hands to dip into pockets:
UNPRECEDENTED EVENT:
FRENCH ENGINEER SEQUESTERED
IN GERMAN AEROBAGNE
His torture! His cry for help! Will the government act?
And lower down, in smaller characters:
We shall commence tomorrow the publication of the manuscript enclosed by our unfortunate compatriot in the leather bottle collected at sea by the transatlantic liner Foch: a terrible story of an agony that has lasted for eighteen months. The government has done nothing
An appeal to public opinion.
Read Le Monde tomorrow, 28 October.
Such news emitted by any other newspaper would perhaps have left the public a trifle suspicious, but on the part of an organ that had never had recourse to any promotional tricks it took on a serious allure, and the objective at which the daily had aimed was perfectly attained. The public commented on the event and awaited the next day with impatience.
The following day, it was learned that the powerful newspaper had printed a million copies of the previous day’s issue. Postal airplanes had carried them all over France; it was openly said that it was not so much the lure of lucre as the desire to impose an energetic line of conduct on the government that had led the French newspaper to act in a fashion so contrary to its habits.
Thus, on that day, the city was visibly animated as five o’clock approached, in a particular fashion.
But the time of the great daily’s appearance brought a disappointment that soon changed to anger, for rancor remained keen in the depths of hearts against those who had unleashed the war; they were known to be perfidious and no one was unaware that they were working, in the complicit shadows, to reach a position in which to take revenge for their defeat.
The reason for that anger was the item that Le Monde published, not this time as a headline but in characters like those of a poster, taking up the entire front page;
At the last moment, the publication of the manuscript thrown in a leather bottle by the French engineer Paul Ménestin, who disappeared from Neustadt in Silesia, where he was resident, eighteen months ago, has been prohibited by order of the French government.
There was an uproar followed by a popular movement. The ministry did not enjoy public favor; people were ready to demonstrate that—but that evening, the belated hour granted it some respite. The following morning, Le Monde once again spread placards in the streets in which it explained what had happened, thus applying, without seeming to do so, a lighted torch to the pile of straw.
This is how the newspaper expressed it:
Yesterday, at the moment of going to press, a ministerial order arrived forbidding the publication of a manuscript that the ministry judges to be apocryphal. At the same time, agents placed at the door of our offices of sales and dispatch, made certain that no copy could cross that threshold.
Either the ministry is mistaken or it is acting in bad faith. The manuscript was written by Paul Ménestin, and we have proof of that.
Paul Ménestin, a French engineer who graduated from the École des Mines three years ago, had been employed in a German metallurgical factory. Eighteen months ago our compatriot disappeared abruptly, without any investigation being undertaken by the authorities of the country to clarify the mystery of that event. Today, we are in a position to affirm that Paul Ménestin really is, as he has written and for reasons of State, sequestered aboard the German aerobagne 32.
We have sent a reporter to Neustadt; he has carried out an investigation, consulted the mortuary registers, and has found nothing that might explain the sudden disappearance of our compatriot. We are no longer in the age of miracles, even though people have not ceased persuading us that black is white, or at least trying to do so.
How did this manuscript fall into our hands? That is our business, but in order to be precise and to prove our entire good faith, we ought to add that we do not possess the original, only a photographic reproduction of it.
We were about to print a facsimile of one of the photographic pages and publish almost a tenth of the whole story when the ministerial order arrived to stop us.
What will the President of the Council do? He has the original in his hands.
If the manuscript is apocryphal, he has no reason to forbid its publication; let its falsity be demonstrated to us and we will be the first to present the whole as a work of imagination. If it is authentic, what are the reasons for the action of the President of the Council?
We have a right to know, and we demand to know.
That article, of course, did not calm minds; on the contrary, the turbulent element of the population found therein an excellent pretext for becoming more heated. Demonstrations were manifest outside the Ministry of the Interior, and acclamations outside the offices of Le Monde.
In the Chambre, a député asked a question. The Minister replied that the document did indeed exist, and that it even constituted, if it was an expression of the truth, a charge of exceptional gravity against Germany, but that, precisely because of the chain of events it might sent in motion, and also by reason of the doubt that subsisted as to its authenticity, he had considered it his duty to forbid its publication. He was waiting for the investigation that he had ordered our ambassador to open to be completed and the result known.
The Chambre was content with that explanation, but the crowd did not admit it, and was agitated all that evening until the moment when the Minister announced that a wireless message from Berlin permitted the publication of the famous manuscript and that furthermore, complementary information would be given by the morning papers.
That declaration calmed the peaceful citizens, and also opinion, which wanted nothing better than to be calm. But it was palpable that everyone wanted light to be cast on the tenebrous affair.
The following day, the newspapers announced that the German government itself had taken a spontaneous step toward the French ambassador and had brought a letter from Paul Ménestin, found in the latter’s room in Neustadt. In that letter the engineer declared that his life had become unbearable far from his homeland and that he envisaged the completion of the contract binding him to the German metallurgical factory as impossible. In those circumstances he preferred to kill himself, wishing that the death in question remain unknown.
It was the letter of a depressed individual; it was possible that things had happened thus.
The German government had also deposited in the hands of the French ambassador all the papers, money and effects found in the home of the unfortunate engineer, and all those poor items would arrive in Paris by diplomatic bag. As for the cadaver, it has not been recovered, and it was supposed that the desperate individual must, in a sharper fit of anguish, have thrown himself into the Oder at Kosel, only fifty kilometers way from Neustadt by railway.
Thus, the official note added, the manuscript could not be anything but the work of a romancer desirous of making a striking impact, or one of the fantasists who are not sorry to dupe public opinion and laugh thereafter at its naivety. In addition, the original manuscript was not signed Paul Ménestin, as the newspaper affirmed, but merely with a P and a scarcely legible name, which might as easily be Monestier or Bésnestier as Ménestin.
Le Monde agreed, in a small special edition issued at two o’clock, that the photographic copy it possessed bore an almost illegible signature capable of giving rose to various interpretations, but that it had opened a preliminary investigation and that its conviction remained entire.
At the same time, it announced the publication of the first fragment for that evening.
The editor-in-chief of Le Monde, Charles Sauter, was in his office when he was informed that a young woman, accompanied by an old lady, was asking to see him. With a brief gesture the editor-in-chief swept away, so to speak, the office boy who had disturbed him, but the latter, who was familiar with his ways, was untroubled.
“It’s just,” he said, “that it’s about the manuscript...”
Charles Sauter’s attitude immediately changed.
“Send them in right away,” he said, “and don’t let anyone disturb us.”
A moment later, the two women were introduced. The editor-in-chief, standing up, briefly gestured toward two armchairs placed in front of his desk. The padded door closed again, and nothing could any longer be heard but the muffled and distant noise of machines.
“Monsieur,” said the younger of the two women, lifting up the crepe veil that was covering her face, “my name is Mathilde Régis, and this is my mother. I was…I am Paul Ménestin’s fiancée.”
Charles Sauter, who was sketching a slight bow, raised his head swiftly and looked at the young woman attentively.
She had a strange pallor; her face, a distinguished oval, denounced a great fatigue or an extreme dolor, and her large dark eyes, with a frank but melancholy gaze, were burning with an intense fever.
“Monsieur,” the young woman continued, “I am Paul Ménestin’s fiancée, and I share your conviction. The note published this morning is a lie. Paul is not dead...”
She hesitated momentarily; her mother placed a hand gently on her arm. That simple gesture restored the young woman’s courage.
“I have brought you, Monsieur,” she continued, “An entire packet of letters that he wrote to me from out there; in none of them, even the very last, does he manifest the slightest discouragement. All of them, on the contrary, speak of the future and hope. It is only souls devoid of strength that are discouraged by obstacles and difficulties; he was not…he is not…a coward. I am confiding these letters to you, Monsieur, confiding them to the gallant man you are. Make use of them, publish my name if you judge it appropriate; I do not blush at my love.”
The Mirror of Present Events Page 23
