“I admire you,” I said, a trifled dazed.
“Don’t admire me. I’m one human being among thousands. Bear in mind that from the age of seven, at college, I learned the mysteries of glass-working at the same time as my Latin declensions; that I was able, in the same month, to translate Sophocles with an open book and blow a bottle of two-thirds of a liter; that at the lycée I learned about the caloric transformation of sand into glass, the chemical and physical reasons for that transformation, in the same epoch when I was initiated into Sanskrit, trigonometry and the rules of river-boating; that at the gymnasium I learned the history of the glass-working industry concurrently with those of philosophy and equitation; that at University, the social adaptations of glass to greenhouses, interior paving and the construction of telescopic lenses were taught to me by the same professors preaching the principles of astronomy, the theorems of general economics and the psychology of crowds, without, for that, it being permissible for me to neglect the firing range, nor the maneuvering of sails, nor the amorous initiations that the reestablished young mothers dispense to adolescents in our city of Venus.”
“That’s a complete education!”
“Ha ha! It’s not yet divine, but in fifty years, the country has succeeded in installing in mores the truth that pleasure is Knowledge, that honor is Production and that shame is Destruction. We’ve taken a few steps.”
“Have these ladies received the same instruction?”
“Not absolutely,” Théa replied. “Our literary and esthetic knowledge is particularly developed, to the detriment of the pure sciences. We know how to paint, sculpt, construct the plan of an edifice, write a faultless symphony, play comedy and tragedy, and dance in accordance with ancient traditions and the art of modern ballet. We possess several dead languages better than men. The fine arts have devolved to us.”
“Do you learn métiers?”
“Oh, yes. Our social service includes bureaucracy. There’s no bureaucratic man. We also exercise the direction of the national esthetic. Women compose the décor of cities, and also occupy themselves with agriculture and gardening, according to their aptitudes.”
“But there are many mixed functions in which men and women compete,” Pythie declared. “Medicine, for example, agriculture too, and gardening. The two are confused. We’re weavers, telephonists and telegraphists. In studying philology, Monsieur is encroaching on our domain, and it’s not forbidden to any of us to preoccupy ourselves with mechanics or artillery, even though those fields of investigation are usually male preserves.”
“What about the law?” I asked.
“Every work group,” Théa replied, “judges the fault of one of its members. The convicted individual can appeal the verdict to other groups. If he’s convicted of a crime, he’s punished. There’s only one crime: contravening the law of labor. Whether a man kills or refuses to work conscientiously, the crime is the same and the punishment similar. The convict is enrolled in a regiment for life. Having wanted to destroy social Harmony, he’s sentenced to destruction and murder in perpetuity. If the mothers who produce life are heaped with honor, soldiers are heaped with opprobrium. People turn away when they go past.”
“So you punish the theft of a loaf of bread and the murder of ten people in the same way?”
“No one steals bread. Anyone who is hungry goes into a refectory and eats until his appetite is sated, and drinks until his thirst is slaked, forty times a day if it pleases him. With the means of intensive culture, we can make land render four and a half times as much as it requires to stuff the entire people with nourishment.”
“In Europe,” said the bottle-blower, “you could nourish five times your population if, instead of letting your peasants scratch their fields with the implements of savages, you used common culture and scientific methods of renewing the soil, plowing it and inseminating it. Your goal isn’t to nourish but to possess, to overproduce and to sell. Here, we don’t sell anything; we consume everything. There are no poor people, nor thieves of bread—nor thieves of gold, since one can’t do anything with gold, no one being able to buy anything.”
“And what if someone wants to make a gift of it?”
“No one can possess anything. When our clothes are dirty we change them. Even our underwear doesn’t remain in our hands; and we never know whether we’ll go to bed in the evening in the same room as the night before.”
“I suspect that a perpetual espionage watches you.”
“Yes, but it’s not inconvenient. No one has anything to hide. Like Gil Blas, one carries one’s entire fortune on one’s back. Who would want to steal, if there’s nothing to steal, everything belonging to everyone?”
“Who are the criminals, then?”
“The wrathful, who kill or try to kill in a quarrel, or insult a contradictor gravely. The idle, who refuse to work. The smugglers, who attempt to introduce alcohol or tobacco. Those are the principal criminals. The bulk of the army is composed of people who calumniate, insult or do violence to a woman.”
“And you don’t fear a revolt of the armed men?”
“No, because the aerial ship and its torpedoes is always over their camps and their columns on the march.”
“It isn’t soldiers who form the crews of the aeronautical crews?”
“No, scientists.”
The conversation petered out. The train was speeding through the humid shadow of infinite forests with the crazy velocity obtained, not by steam or electricity, but by the continual explosion of detonated gas. We were traveling through a deafening thunder.
Théa went to sleep. Night was about to fall. The bottle-blower turned the switch controlling the lights, which dimmed, and settled himself in order to go to sleep. His neighbors were already breathing more heavily. Pythie drew closer to my fever, seized my hand and drew me through the connecting corridor into another compartment of the train. There was a little lodge passed with poppy-red silk. The carpet was something soft, like an eiderdown; there was no other seat.
“You ought,” she said, “to have treasures of amorous ardor, and not to be blasé, like the men here, whose satiety our bodies no longer seduce.”
Without any further oratory precautions, she raised her lips toward mine; the viper of her tongue slid between my teeth. Her skillful hands, full of intention, half-undressed me. The effect of her caress was manifest; she shivered all along her spine on perceiving it.
Thus we reached the city of Minerve, in a few voluptuous hours.
LETTER III
Minerve, September 1896
Palais des Voyageurs.
My dear friend,
Nothing, among the impressions that assail me here, astonishes me more than the deviation of socialist ideas. The principle of liberty seems to have been denied immediately upon the descent of Jérôme the Founder in this land. Militarily and tyrannically, he led the revolutionaries to their ideal. In any case, it is sufficient to consider his statues, in which he appears in a martial attitude, his gaiters up to his knees, his hair in the wind, his side-whiskers rough and short, his eyebrows joined, his lip curled and shaven. On the plastron of his frock-coat with a folded skirt, a meager chest justifies the bronze pleats. A historic gesture launches the first seeds into the air. The other hand clutches the handle of the plow like a weapon. The feet are embedded in the soil. Deeply sunk in the shadow of the eyebrows, the eyes are small and watchful. The heavy nose overhangs the cleft of the sneering mouth. Those characteristics of the effigy design the rudeness of the soul sufficiently.
His work, in the beginning, was, in any case, entirely warlike. The Malay tribes were disquieted by those men, who arrived without merchandise, from the coast facing China where the British commercial ailing ships had left them. Scarcely had they disembarked from the junks than they knew the treachery of ambushes during the long marches through the humidity of the forests. Five years it required, step by step, to fray a passage, remounting the course of new rivers, which drowned temporary camps with sudden
floods; and those men, fleeing Europe because of hatred of injustice and social war, found, on the threshold of the anticipated paradise, battles, and then the cruelty of Asiatic tortures for prisoners and laggards.
The imminence of peril thus constrained those libertarians to the strictest discipline. Around them prowled the sanction of death. It was necessary to forget all the claims and all the hopes of solitary individuality. When the high plateaux had been conquered, and access to them forbidden, a salubrious country finally discovered, with propitious waters, deposits of oil and metals, a fertile humus, and the ears of the first crop ground, that sense of obedience occupied the reason of everyone. Jérôme only had to promulgate his laws.
Had that son of a Picard horse-dealer nursed the vulgar ambition of generals and nourished the stupid desire to return triumphantly to Paris, nothing would have been less difficulty for him. He did not want that wretched privilege. On the contrary, during the French expedition in China, he issued severe decrees forbidding any imprudence capable of revealing the mysterious and already prosperous empire. Such was his authority that no one transgressed the prescriptions or attempted to return to Europe spontaneously. Emissaries were sent there several times for the public interest, without their speech betraying the secret.
Perhaps the Asiatic climate, favorable throughout the course of history to the success of absolute autocracies, modified the character of the pioneers; perhaps the infiltration of autochthonous races was able to insinuate into the conquerors the respect for destiny that imposes the will of a king on millions of human beings. At any rate, a singular languor persists in the eyes and the allure of people. Their eyelids seem weighed down by resignation; their smile wanders with indulgence and skepticism. Few things move them. If people in the streets couple on stone divans installed in the depths of the arcades bordering the numerous squares with fountains, or even if the momentum of a tram cuts the body of an impudent person in two, that is not sufficient to deflect them greatly from their internal reverie. An expression of disdain is scarcely sketched on their faces for the former spectacle; and for the second, the face they pull is more because of the disgust procured by the bloody mess than commiseration for the victim.
I cannot tell you the extent to which that character grates upon our impetuous habits of participating in all the manifestations of existence in others. Théa and Pythie, my companions, have ended up desolating me. I feel almost ready to hate them. If I talk to them about our arts or our politics, they listen to me without responding, evidently bored. They don’t fail to satisfy my requests for information, but without their speech becoming animated to extol the marvels of their inventions or to denigrate abuses. They aren’t delighted by being able to cross distances with so much celerity, not in enjoying the beautiful décor that the cities possess. They don’t complain about the excessively overt life that obliges them to leave their clothes at the door of the bathroom preceding the dining rooms in order to put on others, new and unfamiliar, imposed by the administration. Everything comes to them on the dot, the sense of struggle is lost. They don’t desire anything with sufficient violence to act in hope. Life seems to them denuded of value. Once I risked a fatal fall at the exit from an elevator. It didn’t even make them blink. Although the intimate connections of sexuality bind me to both of them now, they don’t confide to me their enjoyments or their fears. We remain as much strangers as at the second hour of our meeting. Here, everyone remains a passer-by to everyone else.
Can you imagine that this Pythie almost impassions me? The intelligent charm of her silence, the cruelties of her debauchery and the superiority of her scorn dazzle me. Her fatigued body emits odors that stun, enlacing you with sweetness and warmth. She reads all the secret covetousness in your eyes. Théa and I are devoid of mystery before her. If speech ceases, for a few seconds, to stir our lips, Pythie suddenly starts laughing at what we are thinking, and describes the thought that is capable of amusing her. She’s rarely mistaken. We estimate ourselves inferior at every moment. She sees it too clearly to attempt by her manner to make us feel it.
Before the triple maternity that exempts her from social service, Pythie taught history to the girls to the gymnasium. Her memory knows all the works of the erudite, the compilations of diplomats, the secrets of archives, the anecdotes of annalists, the sentimental causes of wars, and the virtues and weaknesses of cities. When she decides to speak, she reveals the origin, the development, the apogee and the decadence of a social idea expressed in the actions of peoples from century to century. She follows the idea on its travels. She shows it departing from the Orient for the Occident with the migration of races, and then returning, magnified, from the Atlantic toward China with the new European tide, which is recommencing the migrations of the cycle of Ram. Her voice generalizes the efforts of the planetary soul, which has peoples for its vital organism and the human individual for the unity of its cerebral cell. Pythie doesn’t waste time counting the exploits of conquerors or the amours of kings like our professors in Europe. She aims for higher endeavors.
When I listen to her I understand the superiority devolved by fifty years of such an education on the virile age of this young people.
Minerve is the city of bureaucracies and libraries, and of printing. The feminine schools, the colleges, the lycées and gymnasia occupy the burgs surrounding the city at various distances within a radius of twenty-five or thirty kilometers. It is also the city of ministries and ministrations. A league from its limit, in the middle of a very beautiful forest, the University raises its sumptuous monuments, at the end of channels of water and severe hornbeam hedges.
The masculine element is present in limited numbers in the city. It is made up of inventors or workers on leave who come to the libraries in order to perfect their knowledge of scientific indications. So the Palais des Voyageurs is vast in its proportions. The women of the bureaux fill the avenues with their capacious black coats, their white cravats and their hard felt hats. At all the windows of the high edifices one sees them traversing the interior, papers in hand.
In groups, they enjoy the sunlight under the arcades of slender iron that cover the greenhouses preceding the edifices of the Laboratory. Those greenhouses protect hypertrophic flowers against the all-too-frequent rain: inconceivable orchids; monstrous chrysanthemums, and also delicate graminae; corollas that one might believe the crazy wings of minuscule birds. On paths of scarlet sand the ladies walk, two by two, with neither laughter nor outbursts of voices, eyes lowered.
In the public refectories they eat with pleasure, but hastily. They are vast greenhouses too, full of flowers and bushes and scarlet sand. The tables occupy arbors of a sort. They have two, three, ten or twenty place-settings. Through the ceiling of yellow and red glass the daylight spreads, traversed by white canopies. Mechanical organs sing in the basements, and their great voices are transmitted through series of slender metallic columns clad in faience where enamel birds parade.
There is always silence, smiles, a murmur, no loud speech. The frankness of the light allows all the little afflictions of age to appear on the women’s faces, inasmuch as none seem to use powders or cosmetics. Their stiff hair, swollen by hygienic lotions, is rather delicately perfumed, but pimples spoil their rough, dark skin. Few blondes have survived the mixture of races over three generations; but one encounters manifestly Chinese faces with malicious eyes, prim lips and narrow dimensions, and slow and sly Malays. The members of this society stretch nonchalantly in large armchairs made of bamboo and woven rushes.
The male and female domestics are only distinguished from the diners by their costume. They bring the food in closed dishes, the beverages in simple pitchers. The diners drink from crystal glasses a kind of honeyed water, heady beers, cold tea and liquid sorbets. From metal vessels similar to gold, they eat exquisite pâtés, cold meats, jellies and poultry. To avoid the odor of sauces the kitchens prepare nothing hot. The nostrils of these people have become very susceptible. No one tolerates the slighte
st emanation. The effluvia of grilling and roasting that we enjoy nauseate them; but they partake with appetite of salads, tomatoes, spices and a great variety of fruits that the climate favors on espaliers. No cooked vegetables. The pâtés, poultry and roast meats are therefore served in containers known as “mouth assistants.” Far from the cities, in the depths of isolated farms, a decried class of people prepares and cooks those victuals. Soldiers provide the service in abattoirs for which no honest people would take responsibility. The kitchens, from what I understand, are a kind of prison for women.
Above the restaurant, on the upper floors, simple and rapid mechanisms take hold of the plates, present them to jets of boiling water, swiftly turn them upside down, and slide them into driers, room which they re-emerge clean and bright, a beautiful metal similar to gold. Two overseers operate lavers with porcelain handles and switches, and the cleaning of several hundred plates is accomplished automatically in less than an hour without dirtying a single maidservant’s fingernail.
Oh, I’m a long way away from our European family, its hearth, the good odor of soup and our dishwashers. The modest and simple, slightly dirty, existence of our old world is finished. Here, the servers receive us as polite comrades. It isn’t permitted to address any observation that might offend them directly to them. One writes one’s choice of dishes and one’s protest against a smudged glass on pieces of paper.
In the evening, the work groups meet up in the theaters.
Don’t imagine that the theaters resemble ours. Immense edifices with cupolas and basements, they are slightly reminiscent of winter gardens, ballrooms and brothels. The principal one in Minerve possesses a façade in porcelain, very artistically enameled with clusters of men and women who seem to be descending from the sky. It is not unlike the Last Judgment that Michelangelo created. Each of the figures represents passion of a type due to a national literature and they are falling, it seems, through the starry profundities of the firmament along the immense gleaming façade that is not pierced by any window. It is a miracle of art much admired here, where there is no lack of beautiful works. Eighteen young women composed it in the decoration studios of the city of Diane. It took three years to complete.
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