The Supreme Progress

by Brian Stableford

  He was taken prisoner.

  On Sunday, the following Sunday, in the morning, he passed in front of the Colonel-Governor’s house. The blooming lilacs looked like snow hanging from the walls. The sisters were there, waiting for him at the gate. Francine melted in tears, but Philomène seemed radiant. Her increased beauty exalted her. She threw him a sprig of lilac that she had pressed against her lips. A soldier in the escort picked it up and gave it to him. He raised it to his mouth.

  They went down by the patrol circuit. Philomène shouted down to him from the terrace…

  As he went along the wall she said to him: “I admire you and I adore you, because you have opened the new era of love, and because your blood will sanctify it…”

  Philippe felt dazzled internally by an indescribably light. He took up a position in front of the stake and stripped the lilac of its leaves while the sentence of death was being read out. Recovered from enemy hands, the court martial had found him guilty of treason.

  “Have you anything to add?”

  “No. I preferred dying to killing. I’m ready to submit…to that fate…”

  He was taken away. For a moment, his gaze embraced the esplanade, the square formation of troops gleaming in the young sun, and the dozen executioners who were stepping forward. Above them, on the terrace, Philomène was standing upright against the sky, kissing her hands. And she was, to him, the black angel who opens the doors of the new life to souls.

  Without quitting her with his gaze, his heart singing, he gave the order to fire.

  Louis Mullem: The End of a Monopoly

  (c. late 1889s-early 1890s)

  One can be certain that the numerous recent excursions of the Parisian executioner in lofty endeavors have provoked a rather sharp discontentment among certain people in the provinces. This kind of “representational artist,” who has returned to the ascendant in the capital, seems, in fact, likely to discourage departmental natives who are thinking of becoming actors in the same, assuredly dramatic, career. It will therefore not be surprising that requests of this sort are being addressed to the parliamentary commission responsible for the consideration of petitions.

  Lacking in numbers as the signatories doubtless are, their arguments nevertheless merit examination. In the first place, they attempt to emphasize the insufficiency of the monopoly—or, rather, the mononecropoly—that the State has assumed in this business. Critics also highlight the difficulties that the transfer of judiciary woodwork has occasioned, and the relative lack of employment that results for local constructors.

  It also requires to be noted that the present manner of procedure is in complete contradiction with the egalitarian principles of free concurrence.

  The guillotine, as has been so often and so rightly said, maintains a stubborn presence in our judiciary mores. Every French citizen, therefore, ought to have the right to maintain one, if he so desires, as one may install a newsstand or a refreshment-booth.

  The expense would now be much less and a permanently-established apparatus would lead to salutary reflections on the part of those tempted to commit crimes—who, in spite of the pretext of the example invoked in favor of capital punishment, rarely have the opportunity to witness it as simple spectators.

  In the good old days, gibbets and pillories were erected on a long-term basis in places of execution. There are, therefore, sound precedents with regard to this fashion of usefully ornamenting public highways.

  Ever-practical, the Americans do not represent instruments of official murder in mysterious terms. They have recourse to “electrocution,” a barbarous but scientific term, as befits an ultra-civilized device, and they can aliment the battery that must receive the condemned individual from any street-light.

  Then again, the project in question offers unprecedented advantages. It is not only more-or-less attested malefactors who are mortally judged. One may add, on the evidence of the quotidian social thermometer, the quantity of sad individuals whom the lack of any resources leads fatally to the same extremity. The free and “automatic” guillotine would become an indispensable suicide machine for heir use, with an annexe containing everything necessary for writing, according to custom, their last and impotent testaments.

  The mechanism would, in any case, be very simply conceived in a familiar manner. A slot would open beside the aperture, captioned “Insert 10 Centimes.”

  Louis Mullem: The New Year

  (c. late 1889s-early 1890s)

  As radiant as a deity made of dreams, as beautiful as a form detached from the Ideal, she is about to quit the spaces of infinite duration.

  Daughter of time, her turn has come to preside over the flight of hours on Earth.

  She will be the awaited year. She will experience, as a force outside herself, the distancing of the fabulous spheres of extent, and she understands that she is ready to descent along the highway of the heavens.

  She remains motionless for one more instant, letting her eyes wander over the magnificence and the mystery of the naïve regions with which her memory will delight itself during her absence.

  It is a strange land, extending boundlessly into an indescribable depth of light, where there are beings and crowds of uncreated unhumanities, whose supernatural existence expresses nothing but confidence and joy. The gaze cannot grasp the vast plenitude of that enchantment, of which the thought of the exiled infant has a vision that trembles at times, being interrupted, like a reflection of foliage in water, and sometimes fading away, as if in a dream, straying too far into the future.

  “It is the life that might be,” the contemplator says to herself, “and also the life that will become, according to its purpose, so gentle, no noble and so pure….”

  And the sentiments of tenderness, enthusiasm and pity are exalted in the heart of the new year that is going toward human beings. She rises up in the majesty of her mission. She would like to convey to the Earth all that she has just foreseen of possible felicity, all the harmony that a decree of supreme will might render certain.

  But where will the energy and power for such an effort come from? Perhaps from “The One Who Will Be,” the rebel Spirit of invincible and supreme Revolt, whose palace, tracing an edifice of gold and light in the dark blue atmosphere has just surged forth before the Exile on the slope of the sky.

  A multitude flooded the steps and portal of that edifice. The garments of these visitors were made of art, their hands bore works of as-yet-unknown science, their faces revealed beings of bold and serious thought.

  The voyager crossed the threshold and penetrated into the high-ceilinged room with hangings of flame in which Satan was resting on his elbows, absorbed in a mass of books and manuscripts.

  “I know,” he said, raising his severe forehead and letting his genius flow back into his audacious eyes, “yes, I know…you’re going to Earth, like your sisters, the years of the past; you’re ambitious for the glory and the power to ensure humans of the entirety of wisdom. Alas, what can I do for you are present? My return to divinity is still far off. I still have a great many things to do. Until they’re accomplished, I shall remain unruly. I shall create prodigies that will vanquish the last resistances of matter. I shall impose laws in opposition to all deceptive veneration of the past. I shall dissipate forever the shadows of ignorance, suffering and oppression. Perhaps, eventually, I shall establish liberty, fraternity and justice. Who knows?—perhaps I shall even obtain the defeat of oblivion, the eternity of life for the intelligences that know and the souls that love. Then the mirages that I evoked in your path just now will be realized—and that will be good, and I will become once again the true God, for I was and I am Science. But how many more centuries will vanish before I reach my goal? Maintain courage, though. Dispense as best you can your love and your virtue during your few hasty days down there…”

  Slowly and sadly, the departing individual set off again. A cruel premonition troubled her with fear. She felt herself diminished of all that she left behind her of hope and
beauty. She ceased to be the august virgin of imperishable essence and was transformed into a frail adolescent whose heart was tremulous and required support.

  As she directed her course, moreover, the ambient images became more rigid, symbolizing the horror of imminent realities. Faces were drifting, telling fortunes in indolence and pride. Other apparitions displayed poverty, hunger, debauchery and opprobrium. In the distance, peoples were rushing around, disheveled and bloody, in the fury of war. Death floated, its mask turning green with hatred and annihilation.

  Once again, who would dry the tears of that future of folly and anguish?

  A temple loomed up on the horizon. The vaults resounded with the hymns of the organ; the nave extended, thousands of believers kneeling in the candlelight.

  The desperate individual advanced, in supplication, to the sanctuary ruled by “The One Who Is.”

  “I can do nothing,” he said, lost in clouds of incense. “I leave Creation to draw from itself the consequences that it embodies. I remain outside the ideal that is dreamed or pursued. I start nothing, I help nothing and I retreat into myself. On the day when my work was concluded, I proclaimed that ‘it was good’. I was called God—but I am only the Fatality against which you struggle beneath the sky. Go, then, and expect nothing but the triumph of Chance, the impassive sovereign of good and evil.”

  The departing individual set off again, in a terror of fear and prayer. The dolorous miracle of her destiny was complete. She no longer had even the sickly grace of young womanhood. She became a naked child, puny and irresolute, who knew nothing but obedience…

  But she as she reached the extreme limits of the eternal land of chimeras, a cloud enveloped her, in order to guide her to the entrance of the world of verities, in which everything happens.

  Her sisters, the years gone by, were weeping as they departed. They too, when they flew toward somber humanities in their turn, had brought the great hope of deliverance and joy. All of them came back having scarcely begun their task of salvation.

  The night became profound, and the cloud fell into the abyss from on high. The voice of the twelfth hour struck space; an immense rumor rose up of terrestrial life. People cheered, celebrated, sang…and also mourned the advent of the new year.

  Louis Mullem: The Invisibility of Monsieur Gridaine

  (c. late 1889s-early 1890s)

  It is necessary to believe that the inhabitants of Loudéac—particularly the bourgeois and commercial elite of that charming little town—had given evidence of a certain systematically malevolent prejudice with respect to the person of their honorable fellow citizen Monsieur Paulin Gridaine.

  There was nothing very serious, all things considered, in ridiculing Monsieur Gridaine slightly regarding his public actions and gestures, but the gossips made the error of going beyond that, to devote themselves to malicious inductions concerning the private life of the honest taxpayer in question, and even to the propagation of unworthy suspicions regarding the most secret tendencies of his character.

  The evil tongues of the elite in question were thus, in truth, going too far.

  It is true, nevertheless—let it be said unambiguously—that the appearances of M. Paulin Gridaine during his rare peregrinations in Loudéac lent themselves to ironic commentary. For example, he deliberately chose the most deserted streets, and hugged the walls as if he were afraid of being seen by anyone. He rebuffed with a coldly distant reverence any attempted approaches by people he knew, and his eyes turned away with an expression of dolorous ennui whenever he happened to make visual contact with any stroller whatsoever—even those of the sex for the sake of which members of the other go strolling.

  There are, in any case, innocent manias about which there is no need to get unduly excited, the more-or-less valid causes of which it is wiser to investigate—for, with the exception of a few rare notabilities, the commercial and bourgeois society of Loudéac does not present, at first glance, any very striking esthetic interest, and, even without being entirely misanthropic, an independent stroller could, in all justice, refuse them a reciprocity of attention.

  Perhaps our man made the great mistake of ostensibly manifesting that indifference or general antipathy toward others which well-brought-up people hide beneath the veil of politeness—but would such a minute fault suffice to place Paulin Gridaine at the head of the list of the eccentrics of this native town, to lead people to nudges one another on catching sight of him and profess amazement or stifle laughter? Would it suffice, finally, to explain the detrimental propagation of the local, even regional, legend of the man who did not want people to look at him? That surpasses the limits of indiscretion.

  When the authorities, having been alerted by nasty rumors, appeared to want to intervene, Monsieur Grisdaine, who wanted to go unnoticed, became all the more convinced that, on the pubic highway, anonymous policemen “had their eye on him”. Was his case really to be exaggerated to the point of suspecting insanity, and would he then be put under surveillance as danger to the public?

  Such a persecution, both popular and administrative, definitely ceased to be supportable. That was the point at which Paulin Gridaine started to write, from time to time, to the public prosecutor, to warn him about obscure tittle-tattle. He sent that magistrate a series of notes written in the most moderate terms, utterly devoid of acrimony, of which it will be sufficient to reproduce a few extracts here, to give evidence of their author’s state of mind, in contrast to the superficial appreciations of current opinion.

  In the course of these confidences, spaced at wide intervals, Monsieur Gridaine did not, at first, explain the fundamental idea behind his mysterious contemporary actions. He went over his past history, the events of which had produced the genesis, and finally the predominance, of his present opinions.

  The first fragments of autobiography, thus confided to the officer of the court, summarized Paulin Gridaine’s education in Paris and his fruitless efforts, once his studies were concluded, to embark with any chance of success upon any of the careers open in the capital to intellectual energy. He was a born dreamer. The law, medicine, history, theology and other hard-labor traps of that sort became, by turns, the theater of his inaptitude for any methodical discipline.

  Every year, his holidays took him to Loudéac, where the knowledge of his obstinate fiascos inclined him to depressions in which he became very acutely aware that his family “had its eye on him”.

  At this point, one might object that the impressionable Gridaine was perhaps giving way to an excess of imagination. With a little more experience of the human heart, he would doubtless only have perceived a little vague sympathy, if not a complete indifference with respect to him, in the ocular investigations to which he seemed to be obsessively subject.

  The annoyance that Monsieur Gridaine experienced could, nevertheless, be imputed to the fact that, for centuries, the dynasty whose name he bore had been exclusively devoted to the sale of vegetable preserves; he was the only side-branch that had emerged, by some mysterious spontaneity, from that genealogical tree of invariable tradesmen.

  Then again, in the bitterness of his failures, Monsieur Gridaine doubtless estimated that the anomaly of such a random graft on the trunk of his family ought to have been legitimated by a magnificent flowering, by something evidently superior to the vegetables comprising the abovementioned traffic. There was, however, nothing like that; no superiority burst forth in Monsieur Gridaine, and, whether it was unconscious or deliberate, the “family eye” appeared to be scornful of the absence in the young scion—at least for the present—of any fecund seed whose produce might one day surpass, or even attain, the value of the most ordinary dried fruit

  At any rate, whatever the reason was, the gazes aimed at him by his relatives made Monsieur Gridaine’s hair stand on end—his notes to the prosecutor explained—by reason of the striking resemblance that existed between Monsieur Gridaine’s own eyes and those of his kinfolk. Products of the same atavistic mold, these organs functi
oned in a similar manner. They all possessed the same coldness, with the same alternations of rapid sarcasm that Monsieur Gridaine launched into space unawares whenever his reflections returned to the theme of his individual mediocrity—and when his ancestry scrutinized him, Monsieur Gridaine sank into the frightful sensation of seeing his own eyes observing him against his will.

  According to the confessions transmitted by Monsieur Gridaine, these scruples had nothing at all to do with exaggerated modesty or overweening vanity. They derived entirely from a pessimistic system of philosophy, from which Monsieur Gridaine concluded that the fabrication of human beings had been a practical joke played by the force or farce of things.

  As a specimen of that sad species, it seemed no less humiliating to him to be examined in his external appearance than in any activity of his mental being. The former case, he said, concerns a vain configuration that only separates itself from inert matter for a fleeting instant, while in the latter, one only encounters incoherent impulsions of a thought that cannot claim the immortality that it imagines and which, by virtue of that very fact, remains incapable of demonstrating any reason for being, private or social, of any kind whatsoever. It became exasperating for Monsieur Gridaine to live as a member of such a pitiful creation, and, in consequence, he hated the idea of anyone analyzing the superfluity of his efforts to live as much as he dreaded considering them himself.

  In brief, Monsieur Gridaine confessed a keen repugnance for the spectacle of his identity in the present conditions of anthropomorphy, and wrote to the prosecutor that if someone could only put him on the track of a method of liberating his “self” in an incorporeal state—which implied the possibility of his infinite fusion with the breath of intelligence spread throughout the universe—he would at least attempt to free his “external self” from confrontation with crowds: in a word, to irrealize his terrestrial effigy by relentlessly perfecting the artifices by means of which he had so far only obtained “a modest commencement of invisibility.” It was, however, necessary for him to abandon this obscure and difficult enterprise, for new arrangements of his intimate existence claimed all his attention for the time being.