corn ceased to be eatable. The cold became so intense that the walls of
the houses as they contracted cracked and admitted blasts of air which
killed the inhabitants on the spot. A physicist affirmed that he saw
crystals of solid nitrogen and oxygen fall from the sky which gave rise
to the fear that the atmosphere would shortly become decomposed. The
seas were already frozen solid. A hundred thousand human creatures
huddling around the huge government stove, which was no longer equal to
restoring their circulation, were turned into icicles in a single night;
and the night following, a second hundred thousand perished likewise. Of
the beautiful human race, so strong and noble, formed by so many
centuries of effort and genius by such an intelligent and extended
selection, there would soon have been only left a few thousands, a few
hundreds of haggard and trembling specimens, unique trustees of the last
ruins of what had once been civilisation.
III
THE STRUGGLE
In this extremity a man arose who did not despair of humanity. His name
has been preserved for us. By a singular coincidence he was called
Miltiades, like another saviour of Hellenism. He was not, however, of
Hellenic race. A cross between a Slave and a Breton he had only half
sympathised with the prosperity of the Neo-Græcian world with its
levelling and enervating tendencies, and amid this wholesale
obliteration of previous civilisation, and universal triumph of a kind
of Byzantine renaissance brought up to date, he belonged to those who
reverently guarded in the depths of their heart the germs of recusancy.
But, like the barbarian stilicho, the last defender of the foundering
Roman world against the barbaric hordes, it was precisely this
disbeliever in civilisation who alone undertook to arrest it on the
brink of its vast downfall. Eloquent and handsome, but nearly always
taciturn, he was not without certain resemblances in pose and features,
so it was said, to Chateaubriand and Napoleon (two celebrities, as one
knows, who in their time were famous throughout an entire continent).
Worshipped by the women of whom he was the hope, and by the men who
stood greatly in awe of him, he had early kept the crowd at arm's
length, and a singular accident had doubled his natural shyness. Finding
the sea less monotonously dull at any rate than terra firma, and in any
case more unconfined, he had passed his youth on board the last
iron-clad of State of which he was captain, in patrolling the coasts of
continents, in dreaming of impossible adventures, and of conquests when
all was conquered, of discoveries of America when all was discovered,
and in cursing all former travellers, discoverers and conquerors,
fortunate reapers in all the fields of glory in which there was nothing
more left to glean. One day, however, he believed he had discovered a
new island--it was a mistake--and he had the joy of engaging in a fight,
the last of which ancient history makes mention, with an apparently
highly primitive tribe of savages, who spoke English and read the Bible.
In this fight he displayed such valour that he was unanimously
pronounced to be mad by his crew, and was in great danger of losing his
rank after a specialist in insanity, who had been called in, was on the
point of publicly confirming popular opinion by declaring he was
suffering from suicidal mono-mania of a novel kind. Luckily an
archæologist protested and showed by actual documents that this
phenomenon, which had become so unusual but was frequent in past ages
under the name of bravery, was a simple case of ancestral reversion
sufficiently serious to merit examination. As luck would have it, the
unfortunate Miltiades had been wounded in the face in the same
encounter; and the scar which all the art of the best surgeons never
succeeded in removing, drew down upon him the annoying and almost
insulting nick-name of "scarred face". It may be readily understood how
from this time forward, soured by the consciousness of his partial
disfigurement, as the ancient bard Byron had formerly been for a nearly
similar reason, he avoided appearing in public, and thereby giving the
crowd an opportunity of pointing the finger of scorn at the visible
traces of his former attack of madness. He was never seen again till the
day when, his vessel being hemmed in by the icebergs of the Gulf Stream,
he was obliged with his companions to finish the crossing on foot over
the solidly frozen Atlantic.
In the middle of the central state shelter, a huge vaulted hall with
walls ten yards thick, without windows, surrounded with a hundred
gigantic furnaces, and perpetually lit up by their hundred flaming maws,
Miltiades one day appeared. The remnant of the flower of humanity, of
both sexes, splendid even in its misery, was huddled together there.
They did not consist of the great men of science with their bald pates,
nor even the great actresses, nor the great writers, whose inspiration
had deserted them, nor the consequential ones now past their prime, nor
of prim old ladies--broncho-pneumonia, alas! had made a clean sweep of
them all at the very first frost--but the enthusiastic heirs of their
traditions, their secrets, and also of their vacant chairs, that is to
say, their pupils, full of talent and promise. Not a single university
professor was there, but a crowd of deputies and assistants; not a
single minister, but a crowd of young secretaries of state. Not a single
mother of a family, but a bevy of artists' models, admirably formed, and
inured against the cold by the practice of posing for the nude; above
all, a number of fashionable beauties, who had been likewise saved by
the excellent hygienic effect of daily wearing low dresses, without
taking into account the warmth of their temperament. Among them it was
impossible not to notice the Princess Lydia, owing to her tall and
exquisite figure, the brilliancy of her dress and her wit, of her dark
eyes and fair complexion, owing in fact to the radiance of her whole
person. She had carried off the prize at the last grand international
beauty competition, and was accounted the reigning beauty of the
drawing-rooms of Babylon. What a different set of individuals from that
which the spectator formerly surveyed through his opera-glass from the
top of the galleries of the so-called Chamber of Deputies! Youth,
beauty, genius, love, infinite treasures of science and art, writers
whose pens were of pure gold, artists with marvellous technique, singers
one raved about, all that was left of refinement and culture on the
earth, was concentrated in this last knot of human beings, which
blossomed under the snow like a tuft of rhododendrons, or of Alpine
roses at the foot of some mountain summit. But what dejection had fallen
on these fair flowers! How sadly drooped these manifold graces!
At the sudden apparition of Miltiades every brow was lifted, every eye
was fastened upon him. He was tall, lean, and wizened, in spite of the
false plumpness of his thick white furs. When he threw back his big
white hood, which recalled the Dominican cowl of antiquity, they caught
sight of his huge scar athwart the icicles on his beard and eyebrows. At
the sight of it first a smile and then a shudder, which was not due to
cold alone, ran through the ranks of the women. For must we confess it,
in spite of the efforts of a rational education, the inclination to
applaud bravery and its indications could not be entirely uprooted from
their hearts. Lydia, notably, remained imbued with this sentiment of
another age, by a kind of moral ancestral reversion which served as a
pendant to her physical atavism. She concealed so little her feelings of
admiration, that Miltiades himself was struck by it. Her admiration was
combined with astonishment, for he was believed to have been dead for
years. They asked one another by what accumulation of miracles he had
been able to escape the fate of his companions. He requested leave to
speak. It was granted him. He mounted a platform, and such a profound
silence ensued, one might have heard the snow falling outside, in spite
of the thickness of the walls. But let us at this point allow an
eye-witness to speak; let us copy an extract of the account that he
phonographed of this memorable scene. I pass over the part of Miltiades'
discourse in which he related the thrilling story of the dangers he had
encountered from the time he left his vessel. (_Continuous applause_.)
After stating that in passing by Paris on a sledge drawn by
reindeer--thanks to it being the season of the dog-days--he had
recognised the site of this buried city by the double-pointed mound of
snow which had formed over the spires of Notre-Dame--(_excitement in the
audience_)--the speaker continued:--
"The situation is serious," said he, "nothing like it has been seen
since the geological epochs. Is it irretrievable? No! (_Hear! hear!_)
Desperate diseases require desperate remedies. An idea, a glimmer of
hope has flashed upon me, but it is so strange, I shall never dare to
reveal it to you. (_Speak! speak!_) No, I dare not, I shall never dare
to formulate this project. You would believe me to be still insane. You
desire it, you promise me to listen to the end to my absurd and
extravagant project? (_Yes! yes!_) Even to give it a fair trial? (_Yes!
yes!_) Well! I will speak. (_Silence!_)
"The hour has come to ascertain to what extent it is true to say and to
keep on repeating, as has been the practice for the last three centuries
since the time of a certain Stephenson, that all our energy, all our
strength, whether physical or moral, comes to us from the sun....
(_Numerous voices: 'That is so'_). The calculation has been made: in two
years, three months, and six days, if there still remains a morsel of
coal there will not remain a morsel of bread! (_Prolonged sensation_.)
Therefore, if the source of all force, of all motion, and all life is in
the sun, and in the sun alone, there is no ground for self-delusion: in
two years, three months, and six days, the genius of man will be
quenched, and through the gloomy heavens the corpse of mankind, like a
Siberian mammoth, will roll for everlasting, incapable for ever of
resurrection. (_Excitement_.)
"But is that the case? No, it is not, it cannot be the case. With all
the energy of my heart, which does not come from the sun--that energy
which comes from the earth, from our mother earth buried there below,
far, far away, for ever hidden from our eyes--I protest against this
vain theory, and against so many articles of faith and religion which I
have been obliged hitherto to endure in silence. (_Slight murmurs from
the centre_.) The earth is the contemporary of the sun, and not its
daughter; the earth was formerly a luminous star like the sun, only
sooner extinct. It is only on the surface that the earth is devoid of
movement, frozen and paralysed. Its bosom is ever warm and burning. It
has only concentrated its fire within itself in order to preserve it
better. (_Signs of interest in the audience_.) There lies a virgin force
that is unexploited, a force superior to all that the sun has been able
to generate for our industry by waterfalls which to-day are frozen, by
cyclones which now have ceased, by tides which to-day are suspended; a
force in which our engineers, with a little initiative, will find a
hundredfold the equivalent of the motive power they have lost. It is no
more by this gesture (_the speaker raises his finger to heaven_), that
the hope of salvation should henceforth be expressed, it is by this one.
(_He lowers his right hand towards the earth.... Signs of astonishment:
a few murmurs of dissent which are immediately repressed by the women_.)
We must say no more: 'Up there!' but, 'below!' There, below, far below,
lies the promised Eden, the abode of deliverance and of bliss: there,
and there alone, there are still innumerable conquests and discoveries
to be made! (_Bravos on the left_.) Ought I to draw my conclusion?
(_Yes! yes!_) Let us descend into these depths; let us make these
abysses our sure retreat. The mystics had a sublime presentiment when
they said in their Latin: 'From the outward to the inward.' The earth
calls us to its inner self. For many centuries it has lived separated,
so to say, from its children, the living creatures it produced outside
during its period of fecundity before the cooling of its crust! After
its crust cooled, the rays of a distant star alone, it is true, have
maintained on this dead epidermis their artificial and superficial life
which has been a stranger to her own.
"But this schism has lasted too long. It is imperative that it should
cease. It is time to follow Empedocles, Ulysses, Æneas, Dante, to the
gloomy abodes of the underworld, to plunge mankind again in the fountain
from which it sprang, to effect the complete restoration of the exiled
soul to the land of its birth! (_Applause here and there_.) Besides,
there is but this alternative: life underground or death. The sun is
failing us: let us dispense with the sun. The plan, which it remains for
me to propose, has been worked out for several months past by the most
eminent men. To-day it is finished; it is final. It is complete in all
its details. Does it interest you? (_On all sides: 'Read it, read it.'_)
You will see that with discipline, patience, and courage--yes, courage,
I risk this evil-sounding word (_'Risk it, risk it.'_)--and above all,
with the aid of that splendid heritage of science and art which comes to
us from the past, for which we are accountable to the most distant of
our descendants, to the boundless universe, and I was going to say, to
God (_signs of surprise_), we can be saved if we will." (_Thunder of
applause_.)
The speaker next entered into lengthy details, which it is useless to
reproduce here, on the Neo-troglodytism which he pretended to inaugurate
as the acme of civilisation, "which had," said he, "began with caves,
and was destined to return to these subterranean retreats, but at a far
deeper level." He displayed designs, quantities and drawings. He had no
trouble in proving that, on condition of burrowing sufficiently deep
into the ground below, they would find a deliciously gentle warmth, an
Elysian temperature. It would be enough to excavate, enlarge, heighten,
and extend the galleries of already existing mines in order to render
them habitable and comfortable into the bargain. The electric light,
supplied entirely without expense by the scattered centres of the fire
within, would provide for the magnificent illumination both by day and
night of these colossal crypts, these marvellous cloisters, indefinitely
extended and embellished by successive generations. With a good system
of ventilation, all danger of suffocation or of foulness of air would be
avoided. In short, after a more or less long period of settling in,
civilised life could unfold anew in all its intellectual, artistic, and
fashionable splendour, as freely as it did in the capricious and
intermittent light or natural day, and even perhaps more surely. At
these last words, the Princess Lydia broke her fan, by dint of
applauding. An objection then came from the right, "With what shall we
be fed?" Miltiades smiled disdainfully and replied: "Nothing is simpler.
For ordinary drinking purposes we first of all shall have melted ice.
Every day we shall transport enormous blocks of it in order to keep the
orifices of the crypts free from obstruction, and to supply the public
fountains. I may add that chemists undertake to manufacture alcohol from
anything, even from mineralised rocks, and that it is the A.B.C. of the
grocer's trade to manufacture wine from alcohol and water. (_'Hear!
hear!' from all the benches_). As for food, is not chemistry also
capable of manufacturing butter, albumen, and milk from no matter what?
Besides, has the last word been said on the subject? Is it not highly
probable that before long, if it takes up the matter, it will succeed in
satisfying, both on the score of quantity and expense, the desires of
the most refined gastronomy? And, meanwhile.... (_a voice timidly:
'Meanwhile?'_) Meanwhile does not our disaster itself, by a kind of
providential occurrence, place within our reach the best stocked, the
most abundant, the most inexhaustible larder that the human race has
ever had? Immense stores, the most admirable which have hitherto been
laid down, are lying for us under the ice or the snow. Myriads of
domestic or wild animals--I dare not add, of men and women (_a general
shudder of horror_)--but at least of bullocks, sheep and poultry, frozen
instantaneously in a single mass, are lying here and there in the public
markets a few steps away. Let us collect, as long as such work is still
possible out of doors, this boundless quarry which was destined to feed
for years several hundreds of millions, and which will well suffice, in
consequence, to feed a few thousands only for ages, even should they
multiply unduly, in despite of Malthus. If stacked in the neighbourhood
of the orifice of the chief cavern, they will be easy to get at and will
provide a delightful fare for our fraternal love-feasts."
Still further objections were formulated from different quarters. They
were forcibly disposed of with the same irresistible easy assurance. The
conclusion is worthy of a verbatim quotation: "However extraordinary the
catastrophe which has befallen us and the means of escape which is left
us may seem in appearance, a little reflection will suffice to prove to
us that the predicament in which we are, must have been repeated a
thousand times already in the immensity of the universe, and must have
been cleared up in the same fashion, being inevitably and normally the
final phase in the life-drama of every star. The astronomers know that
every sun is bound to become extinct; they know, therefore, that in
addition to the luminous and visible stars, there are in the heavens an
infinitely greater number of extinct and rayless stars which continue
endlessly to revolve with their train of planets, doomed to an eternity
of night and cold. Well, if this is the case, I ask you: Can we suppose
that life, thought, and love, are the exclusive privilege of an infinite
minority of solar systems still possessed of light and heat, and deny to
the immense majority of gloomy stars every manifestation of life and
animation, the very highest reason for their existence? Thus
lifelessness, death, the void in movement would be the rule; and life
the exception! Thus the nine-tenths, the ninety-nine hundredths,
perhaps, of the solar systems, would idly revolve like senseless and
gigantic mill-wheels, a useless encumbrance of space. That is impossible
and idiotic, that is blasphemous. Let us have more faith in the unknown!
Truth, here as everywhere else, is without doubt the antipodes of
appearance. All that glitters is not gold. These splendid constellations
which attempt to dazzle us are themselves relatively barren. Their
light, what is it? A transient glory, a ruinous luxury, an ostentatious
squandering of energy, born of illimitable senselessness. But when the
stars have sown their wild oats, then the serious task of their life
begins, they develop their inner resources. For frozen and sunless
without, they literally preserve in their inviolate centres their
unquenchable fire, defended by the very layers of ice. There, finally,
is to be relit the lamp of life, banished from the surface above. For a
last time, therefore, let us look upwards in order there to find hope.
Up there innumerable races of mankind under ground, buried, to their
supreme joy, in the catacombs of invisible stars, encourage us by their
example. Let us act like them, let us like them withdraw to the interior
of our planet. Like them, let us bury ourselves in order to rise again,
and like them let us carry with us into our tomb, all that is worthy to
survive of our previous existence. It is not merely bread alone that man
has need of. He must live to think, and not merely think to live.
"Recall the legend of Noah: to escape from a disaster almost equal to
our own, and to dispute with it all that the earth had most precious in
his eyes; what did he do, though he was but a simple-minded fellow and
addicted to drink? He turned his ark into a museum, containing a
complete collection of plants and animals, even of poisonous plants, of
wild beasts, boa-constrictors, and scorpions, and by reason of this
picturesque but incongruous cargo of creatures mutually harmful and
seeking one and all to devour each other, of this miscellany of living
contradictions which for so long was so foolishly worshipped under the
name of Nature, he believed in good faith to have deserved well of the
future.
"But we, in our new ark, mysterious, impenetrable, indestructible, shall
carry with us neither plants nor animals. These types of existence are
annihilated; these rough drafts in creation, these fumbling experiments
of Earth in quest of the human form are for ever blotted out. Let us not
regret it. In place of so many pairs of animals which take up so much
room, of so many useless seeds, we will carry with us into our retreat
the harmonious garland of all the truths in perfect accord with one
another; of all artistic and poetic beauties, which are all members one
of another, united like sisters, which human genius has brought to light
in the course of ages and multiplied thereafter in millions of copies:
all of which will be destroyed save a single one, which it will be our
task to guarantee against all danger of destruction. We shall establish
a vast library containing all the principal works, enriched with
cinematographic albums. We shall set up a vast museum composed of single
specimens of all the schools, of all the styles of the masters in
architecture, sculpture, painting, and even music. These are our real
treasures, our real seed for future harvests, our gods for whom we will
do battle till our latest breath."
The speaker stepped down from the platform in the midst of indescribable
enthusiasm: the ladies crowded round him. They deputed Lydia to bestow
on him a kiss in the name of them all. Blushing with modesty the latter
obeyed--a further sign of moral atavism on her part--and the applause
redoubled. The thermometers of the shelter rose several degrees in a few
minutes.
It is well to recall to the younger generation these resolute words,
between the lines of which they will read the gratitude they owe to the
heroic "Scarred face," who so nearly died with the reputation of a
mono-maniac. They, too, are beginning to grow enervated and accustomed
to the delights of their underground Elysium, to the luxurious
spaciousness of these endless catacombs, the legacy of gigantic toil on
the part of their fathers, they too, are, inclined to think that all
this happened of its own accord, or at least was inevitable, that after
all there was no other way of escaping from the cold above ground, and
that this simple expedient did not require a great outlay of
imagination. Profound error! At its first appearance, the idea of
Miltiades had been hailed, and rightly enough, as a flash of genius. But
for him, but for his energy, and his eloquence, which was placed at the
service of his imagination, but for his forcefulness, his charm, and his
perseverance, which seconded his energy, let us add, but for the
profound passion that Lydia, the noblest and most valiant of women, had
been able to inspire in him, and which increased his heroism tenfold,
humanity would have suffered the fate of all the other animal or
vegetable species. What strikes us to-day in his discourse is the
extraordinary and truly prophetic lucidity with which he sketched in
general terms the conditions of existence in the new world. Without
doubt, these expectations have been immensely surpassed. He did not
foresee, he could not foresee, the prodigious accessions which his
original idea has received owing to its development by thousands of
auxiliary geniuses. He was far more right than he fancied, like the
majority of reformers--who are generally wrongly accused, of being too
much wrapt up in their own ideas. But on the whole, never was so
magnificent a plan so promptly carried out.