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from Contes Cruels (1883, 1927 ed.)
Translated by Hamish Miles
[To M. HENRY GHYS]
Erstis sicut Dii. OLD TESTAMENT. A strange thing one that could raise a smile at a financier's: our subject is Heaven! But make no mistake; it is heaven considered from an industrial and serious point of view. At the present day certain historic happenings have been scientifically verified and explained (or practically so): the Labarum of Constantine, for instance, and crosses cast upon the clouds by plains of snow, and the phenomena of refraction on the Brocken, and certain effects of mirage in northern countries. These have engaged in a singular degree the mind of a learned engineer from the south, M. Grave, and have, so to speak, incited his emulation, with the result that a few years ago he conceived the luminous project of utilizing the vast expanses of the night in a word, of raising the heavens to the level of our epoch. And what indeed is the good of these azure vaults, useless save to provide a feast for the unhealthy imaginations of the last lingering daydreamers? Would it not earn a legitimate claim to public gratitude, and, let us say it (why not?), to the admiration of posterity, if these sterile spaces were converted into really and fruitfully instructive spectacles, if these immense Saharas were made of some value, if these boundless and transparent tundras could in the end be brought to yield some dividend? We are not concerned here with sentiment. Business is business. We are taking the opportunity of calling on the support, and if need be the energy, of serious people, directed towards the value and the pecuniary results of the unexpected discovery which we have just mentioned. At first sight the root of the matter seems to border on the impossible, almost on the insane. To clear up the azure, to quote rates on the stars, to exploit the two twilights, to organize nightfall, to make the firmament profitable until the return of the unproductive daylight what a dream! What thorny struggles! How it bristles with difficulties! But what problems are there to which Man, strong in the spirit of progress, could not contrive to find the solution? Full of this idea, and convinced that if Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, the printer, had snatched down the thunder-bolt from the heavens, it should a fortiori be possible to utilize this to humanitarian ends, M. Grave studied and travelled, compared and expended and hammered, and in the end perfected those enormous lenses and gigantic reflectors of the American engineers, notably the contrivances of Philadelphia and Quebec (which have fallen, for lack of a tenacious genius, into the domain of Cant and Puff). Whereupon M. Grave proposes (furnished with provisional patents) to offer forthwith to our great manufacturing industries, and even to small businesses, the assistance of an absolute Publicity. Against this system of universal popular information, all competition would be impossible. Let anyone imagine, indeed, some of our great commercial centres, Lyons, Bordeaux, and the like, with their restless populations, at the hour of nightfall. Here one sees that movement, that liveliness, that extraordinary animation which nowadays can only be given to serious towns by financial interests. Suddenly powerful bursts of magnesium or electric light, magnified one hundred thousand times, start from the summit of some flowery hillock, the paradise of young couples some hill, for instance, like our own beloved Montmartre; and these luminous beams, maintained by immense multicoloured reflectors, shoot violently into the depths of the heavens, between Sirius and Aldebaran, in the eye of the Bull, if not even into the midst of the Pleiades, the charming image of that young adolescent holding a scarf whereon we read, with renewed delight every day, these splendid words: MONEY RETURNED IF PURCHASE DOES NOT PROVE SATISFACTORY! Can one adequately picture the different expressions then assumed by all these heads in the crowd, the illumination, the bravos, the care-free gaiety? After the first movement of very pardonable surprise, foes of long standing will embrace, the bitterest domestic feuds will be forgotten, people will sit down under the vine-arbour, the better to relish this spectacle, at once so magnificent and so instructive; and the name of M. Grave, borne upward upon the wings of the breeze, will take its flight into Immortality. The briefest reflection will be enough to allow anyone to conceive the results of this ingenious invention. There would be something astounding (would there not?) to the Great Bear herself, if suddenly, between her sublime paws, there burst forth this disturbing announcement: DO YOU NEED CORSETS? YES OR NO? Or better still: it would surely be a spectacle fit to alarm the weak-spirited and to stir the attention of the clergy, if there should appear on the very disc of our own satellite, on the rotund countenance of the moon, that marvellous dry-point which we have all admired on the boulevards, inscribed "A l'Hirsute!" What a stroke of genius if, on one of the segments drawn between the v of the Sculptor's constellation, one could at last read: VENUS KAULLA REPRODUCTION! What would be one's emotion if, in connection with one of these after-dinner liqueurs whose use is recommended under a variety of titles, one perceived, in the south of Regulus, the capital of the Lion, on the very top of the Virgin's ear, an Angel holding a bottle in one hand, while a strip of paper issued from the mouth with the words: JOVE! IT'S GOOD! In short, it can readily be appreciated that we have to deal here with an unprecedented enterprise in advertising, one with limitless responsibility, and infinite material. (The government could even guarantee it, for the first time in its life!) It would be idle to dwell upon the truly eminent services which such a discovery is called upon to render to society and to Progress. Imagine for instance photography upon glass slides and the process of the magic lantern applied in this fashion that is to say, with magnification of 100,000 for the capture of absconding bankers, or that of notorious criminals! Why, the wrongdoer, henceforth easy to trace, could not so much as put his nose out of his carriage window without seeing his own features denouncing him across the clouds. And in politics! In the business of elections, for example! What preponderance! What supremacy! What an incredible simplification in the methods of propaganda, always so burdensome! No more of those little papers, blue, yellow, or tricolour, which spoil the walls and everlastingly report to us the selfsame name, like something singing endlessly in one's ears! No more of those expensive photographs (faulty, more often than not), which miss their aim; which fail to excite, that is to say, any sympathy at all among the electors, whether from the charm of the features of the candidates, or from the majestic air of the whole. For in politics, when all is said and done, the true worth of a man is dangerous, harmful, and subsidiary: the essential thing is that he should have a "dignified" air in the eyes of his electors. Suppose that at the last election, for example, the medallions of M.B and M.A [footnote: The gentlemen of whom the author seems to speak died while we were putting his story through the press. Publisher] had appeared every evening, as large as life, exactly beneath the star beta of Lyra. That was just their place, it will be agreed, since these gentlemen in their time bestrode Pegasus, if report is to be credited. Both would have been exhibited there, during the evening preceding the poll, both faintly smiling, their foreheads veiled by a fitting inquietude, but none the less with an air of assurance. With the aid of a little wheel, the magic-lantern process could even modify at any moment the expression of the two physiognomies. It would have been possible to make them smile at the Future, shed tears for our disappointments, open the mouth, wrinkle the brow, swell the nostrils in anger, assume an air of dignity do everything in fact which appertains to the public platform and adds so much value to thought in a true orator. Every elector would have made his choice, would have been enabled, in fact, to have a clear view beforehand, would have conceived some idea of what his deputy was like, and would not, as they say, have merely bought a pig in a poke. Indeed, one can affirm that without M. Grave's discovery universal suffrage is simply a farce. Let us look forward, then, to the dawn, or better, the evenings, when M. Grave, supported by the assistance of an enlightened government, will begin his important experiments. The sceptics will have all the cards in their hands between now and then: just as in the days when M. de Lesseps was talking of linking the Oceans (which he has done, despite the sceptics). Here, as then, Science will have the last word, and M. Grave will have the laugh. Thanks to him, the Heavens will at last be good for something, and end indeed by acquiring an intrinsic value. |
(End.)
(Prepared by Laurence Roberts)