Paris in the Twentieth Century Page 14

  This terrible cold spell was widespread in France and in much of Europe; the Rhone, the Garonne, the Loire, and the Rhine were covered with ice, the Thames frozen as far as Gravesend, six leagues below London; the port of Ostend presented a solid surface which wagons could cross, and carriages traversed the Great Belt on the ice.

  The winter's rigors reached as far as Italy, where the snow lay thick on the ground, and Lisbon, where the freeze lasted four weeks, and Constantinople, which was completely snowbound. The extension of these low temperatures had disastrous consequences; a great number of persons died of the cold; it became necessary to suspend all police service; people were attacked nightly in the streets. Carriages could no longer circulate, train service was irregular, and not only did the snow impede movement but it was impossible for the engineers to remain on their locomotives without being mortally stricken by the cold.

  Agriculture was especially afflicted by this enormous calamity; in Provence, the vines, chestnut trees, fig trees, mulberry trees, and olive trees perished in great numbers, their trunks splitting vertically with a single terrible crack; even the reeds and briars succumbed to the snow. The year's wheat and hay harvests were utterly compromised.

  It is easy to imagine the dreadful sufferings of the poor, despite the State's relief efforts; scientific resources were impotent in the face of such an invasion; though Science had mastered the lightning, suppressed distances, subjugated time and space to its will, placed the most secret powers of nature within the reach of all, controlled floods, and mastered the atmosphere, nothing availed against this terrible and invincible enemy, the cold.

  Public charity did somewhat more, but little enough, and poverty attained its ultimate limits. Michel suffered cruelly; he had no fire, and fuel was priceless; his room had no heat whatever. He soon reached the point of reducing his food to the strict minimum and was obliged to resort to the most wretched stopgaps. For several weeks, he lived on a preparation manufactured at the time under the name of potato cheese, a smooth, condensed sort of paste, but even this cost eight sous a pound.

  The poor devil then made do with acorn bread, made with the starch of such substances dried in the open air; it was called scarcity bread. But the season's rigor raised the price to four sous a pound, which was still too dear. In January, in the dead of winter, Michel was reduced to eating coal bread: Science had singularly and scrupulously analyzed bituminous coal, which seemed to be a veritable philosophers' stone; it could become diamond, light, heat, oil, and a thousand other elements, for their various combinations have produced seven hundred organic substances. But it also contained in great quantities hydrogen and carbon, those two nutritive elements of wheat, not to mention an essence which produces the taste and fragrance of the most savory fruits. Out of this hydrogen and this carbon, a certain Dr. Frankland had created a sort of bread, which was sold to the needy at two centimes the pound. It must be confessed that one had to be very fastidious to starve to death: twentieth-century science would permit no such thing.

  Michel, therefore, did not die. But how did he live?

  For cheap as it was, coal bread nonetheless cost something, and when one has no work, two centimes can be found only a certain number of times within a franc. Soon Michel was down to his last coin. He stared at it a long while and began to laugh, though his laughter had a grim ring to it. His head felt bound with iron because of the cold, and his brain was beginning to deteriorate. "At two centimes the pound, " he realized, "and at a pound a day, I still have enough for almost two months' worth of coal bread ahead of me. But since I've never given anything to my dear little Lucy, I'll buy her my first bouquet with this last twenty sous. " And like a madman, the wretch ran out into the street. The thermometer indicated twenty degrees below freezing.

  Chapter XVI: The Demon of Electricity

  Michel walked through the silent streets; snow muffled the footsteps of the infrequent pedestrians; there was no more traffic; it was dark.

  "I wonder what time it is." And the steeple clock of the Hôpital Saint-Louis chimed six. "A clock that measures nothing but sufferings, " he thought. He continued on his way, subject to his obsession: he dreamed of Lucy, but sometimes the girl escaped his thoughts, in spite of himself; his imagination failed to hold on to her; he was starving, without realizing it. Force of habit.

  The sky glittered with incomparable purity in this intense cold; magnificent constellations stretched as far as the eye could see. Unconsciously, Michel was staring at the Three Kings rising on the eastern horizon in the belt of splendid Orion.

  It was a long way from the Rue Grange-aux-Belles to the Rue des Fourneaux, virtually the whole of ancient Paris to be crossed. Michel took the shortest route, turned into the Rue Faubourg-du-Temple, then walked straight along the Rue de Turbigo from the Chateau d'Eau to Les Halles. From here, in a few minutes, he reached the Palais-Royal and entered the galleries through the magnificent gate that opened at the end of the Rue Vivienne. The gardens were dark and empty; a huge white blanket covered the entire space, without stain or shadow. "It would be a pity to walk on that. " And he didn't even realize such a surface would be mainly icy. At the end of the Galerie de Valois, he noticed a brightly illuminated flower shop; he quickly entered and found himself in a veritable winter garden: rare plants, green bushes, freshly picked bouquets, nothing was lacking. Michel's appearance was not promising; the manager of the establishment was mystified by this ill-dressed boy in his flowerbed; they didn't belong together. Michel understood the situation. "Nothing for it, " a sudden voice spoke up in his ears.

  "What kind of flowers can you give me for twenty sous?"

  "For twenty sous!" exclaimed the florist with supreme disdain, "and in December!"

  "Just one flower, then, " Michel answered.

  "All right, we'll give him charity, "the florist decided. And he presented the young man with a half- withered bunch of violets. But he took the twenty sous.

  Michel left the shop, feeling a singular impulse of ironic satisfaction, after having spent the last of his money. "Here I am, literally without a sou." He smiled, though his eyes remained haggard. "Fine, my Lucy will be pleased with her pretty bouquet!" And he held to his face these fast-fading flowers, inhaling with intoxication their absent fragrance. "She'll be glad to have violets in the middle of winter! Onward!" He reached the quay, crossed the Pont Royal, and made his way through the neighborhood of the Invalides and the École Militaire (it had kept the name, at least), and two hours after leaving his room in the Rue Grange-aux-Belles, he arrived at the Rue des Fourneaux.

  His heart was pounding, and he was aware of neither cold nor fatigue. "I'm sure she's expecting me! It's been so long since I've seen her. " Then a thought occurred to him. "But I don't want to interrupt their dinner, that wouldn't be right, they'd have to invite me in—what time is it now?"

  "Eight o'clock, " answered the Église Saint-Nicolas, whose steeple was sharply silhouetted against the sky.

  "Oh! by now everyone's finished dinner. " He headed for number 49 and knocked gently at the door, hoping to surprise his friends.

  The door opened. Just as he began to dash up the stairs, the concierge stopped him. "Where do you think you're going?"

  "To see Monsieur Richelot. "

  "He's not here. "

  "What do you mean he's not here?"

  "He no longer lives here, if you prefer. "

  "Monsieur Richelot no longer lives here?"

  "No! He's left. " "Left?"

  "Evicted. "

  "Evicted!" echoed Michel.

  "He was one of those tenants who never can pay the rent at the month's end. He was thrown out. "

  "Thrown out!" Michel repeated, trembling in every limb.

  "Thrown out. Evicted. Dumped. "

  "Where?"

  "I have no idea, " replied the State employee, who, in this neighborhood, had not yet risen to the ninth rank.

  Without knowing how he got there, Michel found himself back in the street; his
hair was standing on end; he felt his head swaying dreadfully. "Evicted, " he repeated, "thrown out! Then he too is cold, he too is hungry. " And the wretched boy, realizing that all he loved might be suffering, then felt intensely those pains of hunger and cold he had quite forgotten on his own account. "Where can they be? How are they living? The grandfather had nothing, he'll have been dismissed from the school—his one pupil must have left, the cowardly wretch! If I knew him... Where are they?" he kept repeating. "Where are they?" he asked some hurrying pedestrian, who took him for a madman. "She must have thought I was abandoning her in her poverty. " At this thought, he felt his knees weaken; he was about to fall on the hard-packed snow; by a desperate effort he kept his balance. Yet he could not walk: he ran! Extreme pain produces such anomalies. He ran without purpose, without goal; he soon recognized the buildings of the Academic Credit Union and recoiled in horror. "Oh, Science! Industry!" He returned the way he had come. For an hour, he wandered among the hospices crammed into this corner of Paris—Les Enfants Malades, Les Jeunes Aveugles, l'Hôpital Marie-Thérèse, Les Enfants Trouvés, La Maternité, l'Hôpital du Midi, l'Hôpital de La Rochefoucauld, Cochin, Lourcine; there was no escape from this neighborhood of suffering.

  "Yet I don't want to go in here, " he kept reminding himself, as if some force were driving him forward. Then he found himself staring at the walls of the Mont Parnasse cemetery. "Better here, " he decided. Like a drunken man he prowled around this plain of the dead. Finally, he came to his senses on the Boulevard de Sébastopol on the Left Bank, passed in front of the Sorbonne, where Monsieur Flourens[70] was still giving his lectures with the greatest success, still ardent, still so youthful. And then the deranged young man realized he was on the Pont Saint-Michel; the hideous fountain, hidden under its crust of ice and quite invisible, presented its most favorable aspect. Michel dawdled, following the Quai des Grands Augustins as far as the Pont Neuf, and there, eyes wild, he began staring at, or rather into the Seine. "Bad weather for despair!" he exclaimed. "A man can't even drown himself. " Indeed, the river had frozen over; carriages could drive across it without danger; many booths had been set up on the ice during the day, and here and there bonfires had been lighted.

  The splendid river dams of the Seine vanished beneath the mountains of snow; they had been the realization of Arago's great notion in the nineteenth century; dammed, the river would grant the city of Paris, at its lowest level, a power of four thousand horses that cost nothing, and worked constantly. Turbines raised 254 meters of water to the height of 50 meters; now a centimeter of water is twenty cubic meters every twenty-four hours. Thus the inhabitants paid one hundred and seventy times less for their water than in the past; they had a thousand liters for three centimes, and each citizen could use up to fifty liters a day.

  Further, the water being constantly displaced in the pipes, the streets were sprinkled by nozzles, and each house, in case of fire, was sufficiently provided with water at a very high pressure.

  Climbing up the river dam, Michel heard the muffled sound of the Fourneyron[71] and Koechlin[72] turbines still at work beneath the frozen crust. But here, undecided, he turned back and found himself facing the Institute. He was then reminded that the Académie Française no longer included a single man of letters; that following the example of Laprade, who had called Sainte-Beuve a bedbug in the nineteenth century, two other academicians subsequently took the name of that little man of genius mentioned by Sterne in Tristram Shandy, Book One, Chapter Twenty-one, page 156 of the Ledoux and Teuré edition; now that men of letters were becoming decidedly impolite, members ended by taking only the names of Grands Seigneurs.

  The sight of the dreadful dome with its yellowish stripes sickened poor Michel, and he walked past it along the Seine; over his head the sky was cluttered with electric wires passing from one bank to the other and extending like a huge spiderweb as far as the Prefecture of Police.

  He walked across the frozen river; the moon projected ahead of his steps his own enormous shadow, which repeated his movements in fantastic parodies. He followed the Quai de l'Horloge, skirting the Palais de Justice; he crossed back on the Pont au Change, whose arches were filled with tremendous icicles; he passed the Tribunal de Commerce, the Pont Notre-Dame, the Pont de la Réforme, which was beginning to sag under its long burden, and continued walking along the quay.

  He found himself at the entrance of the morgue, open day and night to the living as well as to the dead; he went in quite mechanically, as if he were looking here for someone dear to him; he stared at the corpses, lying stiff, greenish, and swollen on their marble slabs; in a corner he saw the electric apparatus used to restore life to those waterlogged bodies still harboring some spark of existence. "Electricity again!" he exclaimed, and fled.

  Notre-Dame was ahead of him, its windows streaming with light; solemn chanting was audible as

  Michel entered the old cathedral. Mass was just ending. Leaving the darkness of the streets, Michel was dazzled: the altar shone with electric light[73], and beams from the same source escaped from the monstrance raised in the priest's hand. "More electricity, " the miserable boy exclaimed, "even here!" And once more he fled, but not so quickly that he failed to hear the organ roaring with compressed air furnished by the Catacomb Company! Michel was going mad; he believed the demon of electricity was pursuing him, and he returned to the Quai de Grèves, entering a labyrinth of empty streets until he came out into the Place des Vosges, where a statue of Victor Hugo had replaced that of Louis XV, and found himself facing the new Boulevard Napoleon IV, which extended to the square where Louis XIV perpetually gallops toward the Banque de France; making a hairpin turn, he came back along the Rue Notre-Dame des Victoires.

  On the wall of the street perpendicular to the Bourse, he glimpsed the marble plaque where these words were set in gilded letters:

  Historic Marker.

  On the fourth floor of this house

  Victorien Sardou lived from 1859 to 1862

  Michel now stood in front of the Bourse, temple of temples, cathedral of the age; the electric dial showed the time: a quarter to midnight. "The night is frozen too, " he mused, as he walked toward the boulevards. The lampposts relayed their cones of intense white light, and transparent signs on which electricity inscribed advertisements in letters of fire glistened on the rostral columns. Michel closed his eyes; he passed through a large crowd leaving the theaters; he reached the Place de l'Opéra and saw that elegant mass of rich people braving the cold in their furs and cashmeres; he skirted the long row of gas cabs and made his escape through the Rue Lafayette, which stretched straight in front of him for a league and a half. "Let's get away from all these people!" he murmured to himself and sprang forward, skidding, hobbling, sometimes falling, getting to his feet bruised but numb; he was sustained by a force that seemed outside himself.

  As he walked on, silence and abandonment were reborn around him. Yet far in the distance he saw what looked like a tremendous light; he heard a great noise that sounded like nothing he knew. Nonetheless he continued, finally arriving in the center of a deafening racket, an enormous arena which could easily hold some ten thousand persons, and on the pediment of the building was written in fiery letters:

  Electric Concert

  Yes, electric concert, and what instruments! According to a Hungarian method[74], two hundred pianos wired together by means of an electric current could be played by the hands of a single artist! One piano with the power of two hundred! "Away from here, away!" cried the wretch, pursued by this insistent demon. "Away from Paris, perhaps I will find peace!"

  And he dragged himself along, as often on his knees as on his feet. After two hours of struggling against his own weakness, he reached the basin of La Villette, and here he lost his way, imagining he had reached the Porte d'Aubervilliers; he followed the endless Rue Saint-Maur, and for an hour after that he skirted the prison of juvenile offenders, at the corner of the Rue de la Roquette. Here a grim spectacle met his gaze: a scaffold was being
erected, and an execution would be performed at daybreak. The platform was already rising under the hands of the workers, who were singing at their task. Michel tried to avoid this dreadful sight, but he stumbled over an open crate in which he glimpsed, as he got to his feet, an electric battery! Thoughts flooded his mind, and he understood. Decapitations were no longer in vogue—criminals were now executed by an electric charge. Surely it was a better imitation of divine vengeance.

  Michel uttered a final cry, and vanished.

  The steeple of Sainte-Marguerite chimed four.

  Chapter XVII: Et in Pulverem Reverteris

  What became of poor Michel during the rest of that terrible night? Where did chance lead his uncertain steps? Did he wander without being able to escape this deadly capital, this accursed Paris? Unanswerable questions.

  Apparently he traced endless circles amid those countless streets surrounding the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, for the old burying ground was now in the center of a populous neighborhood. The city extended eastward to the fortifications of Aubervilliers and Romainville. Wherever he had been, by the time the winter sun rose over that great white city, Michel found himself inside the cemetery.

  He no longer had the strength to think of Lucy; his ideas were paralyzed; he was no more than a wandering specter among the tombs, and not as a stranger, for he felt at home. He walked up the central avenue and turned right through the sopping lanes of the lower cemetery; snow-laden trees wept over the glistening tombs; the vertical headstones, respected by the snow, were the only ones to offer his eyes the names of the dead. Soon there appeared the ruined funerary monument to Héloïse and Abélard; three columns that supported a broken architrave were still standing, like the Grecostasis[75] of the Roman Forum.

  Michel stared blindly; a little farther along he read the names of Cherubini, Habeneck[76], Chopin, Masse, Gounod, Reyer[77], in that corner dedicated to those who lived for music and perhaps died of it! He walked on.