M. Le Mesge looked at Morhange triumphantly. It was evident that he
addressed himself exclusively to Morhange, considering him alone
worthy of his confidences.
"There have been many, sir," he said, "both French and foreign
officers who have been brought here at the caprice of our sovereign,
Antinea. You are the first to be honored by my disclosures. But you
were the pupil of Berlioux, and I owe so much to the memory of that
great man that it seems to me I may do him homage by imparting to one
of his disciples the unique results of my private research."
He struck the bell. Ferradji appeared.
"Coffee for these gentlemen," ordered M. Le Mesge.
He handed us a box, gorgeously decorated in the most flaming colors,
full of Egyptian cigarettes.
"I never smoke," he explained. "But Antinea sometimes comes here.
These are her cigarettes. Help yourselves, gentlemen."
I have always had a horror of that pale tobacco which gives a barber
of the Rue de la Michodière the illusion of oriental voluptuousness.
But, in their way, these musk-scented cigarettes were not bad, and it
was a long time since I had used up my stock of Caporal.
"Here are the back numbers of _Le Vie Parisienne_" said M. Le Mesge
to me. "Amuse yourself with them, if you like, while I talk to your
friend."
"Sir," I replied brusquely, "it is true that I never studied with
Berlioux. Nevertheless, you must allow me to listen to your
conversation: I shall hope to find something in it to amuse me."
"As you wish," said the little old man.
We settled ourselves comfortably. M. Le Mesge sat down before the
desk, shot his cuffs, and commenced as follows:
"However much, gentlemen, I prize complete objectivity in matters of
erudition, I cannot utterly detach my own history from that of the
last descendant of Clito and Neptune.
"I am the creation of my own efforts. From my childhood, the
prodigious impulse given to the science of history by the nineteenth
century has affected me. I saw where my way led. I have followed it,
in spite of everything.
"In spite of everything, everything--I mean it literally. With no
other resources than my own work and merit, I was received as Fellow
of History and Geography at the examination of 1880. A great
examination! Among the thirteen who were accepted there were names
which have since become illustrious: Julian, Bourgeois, Auerbach.... I
do not envy my colleagues on the summits of their official honors; I
read their works with commiseration; and the pitiful errors to which
they are condemned by the insufficiency of their documents would amply
counterbalance my chagrin and fill me with ironic joy, had I not been
raised long since above the satisfaction of self-love.
"When I was Professor at the Lycée du Parc at Lyons. I knew Berlioux
and followed eagerly his works on African History. I had, at that
time, a very original idea for my doctor's thesis. I was going to
establish a parallel between the Berber heroine of the seventh
century, who struggled against the Arab invader, Kahena, and the
French heroine, Joan of Arc, who struggled against the English
invader. I proposed to the _Faculté des Lettres_ at Paris this title
for my thesis: _Joan of Arc and the Tuareg_. This simple announcement
gave rise to a perfect outcry in learned circles, a furor of
ridicule. My friends warned me discreetly. I refused to believe them.
Finally I was forced to believe when my rector summoned me before him
and, after manifesting an astonishing interest in my health, asked
whether I should object to taking two years' leave on half pay. I
refused indignantly. The rector did not insist; but fifteen days
later, a ministerial decree, with no other legal procedure, assigned
me to one of the most insignificant and remote Lycées of France, at
Mont-de-Marsan.
"Realize my exasperation and you will excuse the excesses to which I
delivered myself in that strange country. What is there to do in
Landes, if you neither eat nor drink? I did both violently. My pay
melted away in _fois gras_, in woodcocks, in fine wines. The result
came quickly enough: in less than a year my joints began to crack like
the over-oiled axle of a bicycle that has gone a long way upon a dusty
track. A sharp attack of gout nailed me to my bed. Fortunately, in
that blessed country, the cure is in reach of the suffering. So I
departed to Dax, at vacation time, to try the waters.
"I rented a room on the bank of the Adour, overlooking the _Promenade
des Baignots_. A charwoman took care of it for me. She worked also for
an old gentleman, a retired Examining Magistrate, President of the
Roger-Ducos Society, which was a vague scientific backwater, in which
the scholars of the neighborhood applied themselves with prodigious
incompetence to the most whimsical subjects. One afternoon I stayed in
my room on account of a very heavy rain. The good woman was
energetically polishing the copper latch of my door. She used a paste
called Tripoli, which she spread upon a paper and rubbed and
rubbed.... The peculiar appearance of the paper made me curious. I
glanced at it. 'Great heavens! Where did you get this paper?' She was
perturbed. 'At my master's; he has lots of it. I tore this out of a
notebook.' 'Here are ten francs. Go and get me the notebook.'
"A quarter of an hour later, she was back with it. By good luck it
lacked only one page, the one with which she had been polishing my
door. This manuscript, this notebook, have you any idea what it was?
Merely the _Voyage to Atlantis_ of the mythologist Denis de Milet,
which is mentioned by Diodorus and the loss of which I had so often
heard Berlioux deplore.[10]
[Footnote 10: How did the _Voyage to Atlantis_ arrive at Dax? I have
found, so far, only one credible hypothesis: it might have been
discovered in Africa by the traveller, de Behagle, a member of the
Roger-Ducos Society, who studied at the college of Dax, and later, on
several occasions, visited the town. (Note by M. Leroux.)]
"This inestimable document contained numerous quotations from the
Critias. It gave an abstract of the illustrious dialogue, the sole
existing copy of which you held in your hands a little while ago. It
established past controversy the location of the stronghold of the
Atlantides, and demonstrated that this site, which is denied by
science, was not submerged by the waves, as is supposed by the rare
and timorous defenders of the Atlantide hypothesis. He called it the
'central Mazycian range,' You know there is no longer any doubt as to
the identification of the Mazyces of Herodotus with the people of
Imoschaoch, the Tuareg. But the manuscript of Denys unquestionably
identifies the historical Mazyces with the Atlantides of the supposed
legend.
"I learned, therefore, from Denys, not only that the central part of
Atlantis, the cradle and home of the dynasty of Neptune, had not sunk
in the disaster described by Plato as engulfing the rest of the
Atlantide isle, but also that it corresponded to the Tuareg Ahaggar,
and that, in this Ahaggar, at least in his time, the noble dynasty of
Neptune was supposed to be still existent.
"The historians of Atlantis put the date of the cataclysm which
destroyed all or part of that famous country at nine thousand years
before Christ. If Denis de Milet, who wrote scarcely three thousand
years ago, believed that in his time, the dynastic issue of Neptune
was still ruling its dominion, you will understand that I thought
immediately--what has lasted nine thousand years may last eleven
thousand. From that instant I had only one aim: to find the possible
descendants of the Atlantides, and, since I had many reasons for
supposing them to be debased and ignorant of their original splendor,
to inform them of their illustrious descent.
"You will easily understand that I imparted none of my intentions to
my superiors at the University. To solicit their approval or even
their permission, considering the attitude they had taken toward me,
would have been almost certainly to invite confinement in a cell. So I
raised what I could on my own account, and departed without trumpet or
drum for Oran. On the first of October I reached In-Salah. Stretched
at my ease beneath a palm tree, at the oasis, I took infinite pleasure
in considering how, that very day, the principal of Mont-de-Marsan,
beside himself, struggling to control twenty horrible urchins howling
before the door of an empty class room, would be telegraphing wildly
in all directions in search of his lost history professor."