Underground Man

Tradition informs us that the bill relating to this indispensable extension of the franchise would have been infallibly rejected, if, luckily, the recent election of a multi-millionaire suspected of imperialistic tendencies had not scared the assembly. It fancied it would injure the popularity of this ambitious pretender by hastening to welcome this proposal in which it only saw one thing, that is, that the fathers and husbands, outraged or alarmed by the gallantries of the new Cæsar, would be all the stronger for impeding his triumphant march. But this expectation was, it appears, unrealised.

Whatever may be the truth of this legend, it is certain that, owing to the enlargement of the electoral districts, combined with the suppression of the electoral privileges, the election of a deputy was a veritable coronation, and ordinarily produced in the elect a species of megalomania. This reconstituted feudalism was bound to end in a reconstitution of monarchy. For a moment the learned wore this cosmic crown, following the prophecy of an ancient philosopher, but they did not keep it. The popularisation of knowledge through innumerable schools had made science as common an object as a charming woman or an elegant suite of furniture. It had been extraordinarily simplified by the thorough way in which it had been worked out, complete as regards its general outlines, in which no change could be expected, and its henceforth rigid classification abundantly garnished with data. Only advancing at an imperceptible pace, it held, in short, but an insignificant place in the background of the brain, in which it simply replaced the catechism of former days. The bulk of intellectual energy was therefore to be found in another direction, as were also its glory and prestige. Already the scientific bodies, venerable in their antiquity, began, alas! to acquire a slight tinge and veneer of ridicule, which raised a smile and recalled the synods of bonzes or ecclesiastical conferences, such as are represented in very ancient pictures. It is, therefore, not surprising that this first dynasty of imperial physicists and geometricians, genial copies of the Antonines, were promptly succeeded by a dynasty of artists who had deserted art to wield the sceptre, as they lately had wielded the bow, the roughing chisel, and the brush. The most famous of all, a man possessed of an overflowing imagination which was yet well under control, and ministered to by an unparalleled energy, was an architect who among other gigantic projects formed the idea of rasing to the ground his capital, Constantinople, in order to rebuild it elsewhere, on the site of ancient Babylon, which for three thousand years had been a desert – a truly luminous idea. In this incomparable plain of Chaldea watered by a second Nile there was another still more beautiful and fertile Egypt awaiting resurrection and metamorphosis, an infinite expanse extending as far as the eye could see, to be covered with striking public buildings constructed with magical speed, with a teeming and throbbing population, with golden harvests beneath a sky of changeless blue, with an iron net-work of railways radiating from the town of Nebuchadnesor to the furthest ends of Europe, Africa and Asia, and crossing the Himalayas, the Caucasus, and the Sahara. The stored energy, electrically conveyed, of a hundred Abyssinian waterfalls, and of, I do not know, how many cyclones, hardly sufficed to transport from the mountains of Armenia the necessary stone, wood and iron for these numerous constructions. One day an excursion train, composed of a thousand and one carriages, having passed too close to the electric cable at the moment when the current was at its maximum, was destroyed and reduced to ashes in the twinkling of an eye. None the less Babylon, the proud city of muddy clay, with its paltry splendours of unbaked and painted brick, found itself rebuilt in marble and granite, to the utmost confusion of the Nabopolassars, the Belshazzars, the Cyruses, and the Alexanders. It is needless to add that the archæologists made on this occasion the most priceless discoveries, in the several successive strata, of Babylonian and Assyrian antiquities. The mania for Assyriology went so far that every sculptor's studio, the palaces, and even the King's armorial bearings were invaded by winged bulls with human heads, just as formerly the museums were full of cupids or cherubims, "with their cravat-like wings". Certain school books for primary schools were actually printed in cuneiform characters in order to enhance their authority over the youthful imagination.

This imperial orgy in bricks and mortar having unhappily occasioned the seventh, eighth, and ninth bankruptcy of the State and several consecutive inundations of paper-money, the people in general rejoiced to see after this brilliant reign the crown borne by a philosophical financier. Order had hardly been re-established in the finances, when he made his preparation for applying on a grand scale his ideal of government, which was of a highly remarkable nature. One was not long in noticing, in fact, after his accession, that all the newly chosen ladies of honour, who were otherwise very intelligent but entirely lacking in wit, were chiefly conspicuous for their striking ugliness; that the liveries of the court were of a grey and lifeless colour; that the court balls reproduced by instantaneous cinematography to the tune of millions of copies furnished a collection of the most honest and insignificant faces and unappetising forms that one could possibly see; that the candidates recently appointed, after a preliminary despatch of their portraits, to the highest dignities of the Empire, were pre-eminently distinguished by the commonness of their bearing; in short, that the races and the public holidays (the date of which were notified in advance by secret telegrams announcing the arrival of a cyclone from America), happened nine times out of ten to take place on a day of thick fog, or of pelting rain, which transformed them into an immense array of waterproofs and umbrellas. Alike in his legislative proposals, as in his appointments, the choice of the prince was always the following: the most useful and the best among the most unattractive. An insufferable sameness of colour, a depressing monotony, a sickening insipidity were the distinctive note of all the acts of the government. People laughed, grew excited, waxed indignant, and got used to it. The result was that at the end of a certain time it was impossible to meet an office-seeker or a politician, that is to say, an artist or literary man, out of his element and in search of the beautiful in an alien sphere, who did not turn his back on the pursuit of a government appointment in order to return to rhyming, sculpture and painting. And from that moment the following aphorism has won general acceptance, that the superiority of the politician is only mediocrity raised to its highest power.

This is the great benefit that we owe to this eminent monarch. The lofty purpose of his reign has been revealed by the posthumous publication of his memoirs. Of these writings with which we can so ill dispense, we have only left this fragment which is well calculated to make us regret the loss of the remainder: "Who is the true founder of Sociology? Auguste Comte? No, Menenius Agrippa. This great man understood that government is the stomach, not the head of the social organism. Now, the merit of a stomach is to be good and ugly, useful and repulsive to the eye, for if this indispensable organ were agreeable to look upon, it would be much to be feared that people would meddle with it and nature would not have taken such care to conceal and defend it. What sensible person prides himself on having a beautiful digestive apparatus, a lovely liver or elegant lungs? Such a pretension would, however, not be more ridiculous than the foible of cutting a great dash in politics. What wants cultivating is the substantial and the commonplace. My poor predecessors." … Here follows a blank; a little further on, we read: "The best government is that which holds to being so perfectly humdrum, regular, neuter, and even emasculated, that no one can henceforth get up any enthusiasm either for or against it."

Such was the last successor of Semiramis. On the re-discovered site of the Hanging-gardens he caused to be erected, at the expense of the State, a statue of Louis Philippe in wrought aluminium, in the middle of a public garden planted with common laurels and cauliflowers.

The Universe breathed again. It yawned a little no doubt, but it revelled for the first time in the fulness of peace, in the almost gratuitous abundance of every kind of wealth. It burst into the most brilliant efflorescence, or rather display of poetry and art, but especially of luxury, that the world had as yet seen. It was just at that moment an extraordinary alarm of a novel kind, justly provoked by the astronomical observations made on the tower of Babel, which had been rebuilt as an Eiffel Tower on an enlarged scale, began to spread among the terrified populations.

II
THE CATASTROPHE

On several occasions already the sun had given evident signs of weakness. From year to year his spots increased in size and number, and his heat sensibly diminished. People were lost in conjecture. Was his fuel giving out? Had he just traversed in his journey through space an exceptionally cold region? No one knew. Whatever the reason was, the public concerned itself little about the matter, as in all that is gradual and not sudden. The "solar anæmia," which moreover restored some degree of animation to neglected astronomy, had merely become the subject of several rather smart articles in the reviews. In general, the savants, in their well-warmed studies, affected to disbelieve in the fall of temperature, and, in spite of the formal indications of the thermometer, they did not cease to repeat that the dogma of slow evolution, and of the conservation of energy combined with the classical nebular hypothesis, forbade the admission of a sufficiently rapid cooling of the solar mass to make itself felt during the short duration of a century, much more so during that of five years or a year. A few unorthodox persons of heretical and pessimistic temperament remarked, it is true, that at different epochs, if one believed the astronomers of the remote past, certain stars had gradually burnt out in the heavens, or had passed from the most dazzling brilliance to an almost complete obscurity, during the course of barely a single year. They therefore concluded that the case of our sun had nothing exceptional about it; that the theory of slow-footed evolution was not perhaps universally applicable; and that, sometimes, as an old visionary mystic called Cuvier had ventured to put forward in legendary times, veritable revolutions took place in the heavens as well as on earth. But orthodox science combated with indignation these audacious theories.

However, the winter of 2489 was so disastrous, it was actually necessary to take the threatening predictions of the alarmists seriously. One reached the point of fearing at any moment a "solar apoplexy." That was the title of a sensational pamphlet which went through twenty thousand editions. The return of the spring was anxiously awaited.

The spring returned at last, and the starry monarch reappeared, but his golden crown was gone, and he himself well-nigh unrecognisable. He was entirely red. The meadows were no longer green, the sky was no longer blue, the Chinese were no longer yellow, all had suddenly changed colour as in a transformation scene. Then, by degrees, from the red that he was he became orange. He might then have been compared to a golden apple in the sky, and so during several years he was seen to pass, and all nature with him, through a thousand magnificent or terrible tints – from orange to yellow, from yellow to green, and from green at length to indigo and pale blue. The meteorologists then recalled the fact, in the year 1883, on the second of September, the sun had appeared in Venezuela the whole day long as blue as the moon. So many colours, so many new decorations of the chameleon-like universe which dazzled the terrified eye, which revived and restored to its primitive sharpness the rejuvenated sensation of the beauties of nature, and strongly stirred the depths of men's souls by renewing the former aspect of things.

At the same time disaster succeeded disaster. The entire population of Norway, Northern Russia, and Siberia perished, frozen to death in a single night; the temperate zone was decimated, and what was left of its inhabitants fled before the enormous drifts of snow and ice, and emigrated by hundreds of millions towards the tropics, crowding into the panting trains, several of which, overtaken by tornadoes of snow, disappeared for ever.

The telegraph successively informed the capital, now that there was no longer any news of immense trains caught in the tunnels under the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Caucasus, or Himalayas, in which they were imprisoned by enormous avalanches, which blocked simultaneously the two issues; now that some of the largest rivers of the world – the Rhine, for instance, and the Danube – had ceased to flow, completely frozen to the bottom, from which resulted a drought, followed by an indescribable famine, which obliged thousands of mothers to devour their own children. From time to time a country or continent broke off suddenly its communication with the central agency, the reason being that an entire telegraphic section was buried under the snow, from which at intervals emerged the uneven tops of their posts, with their little cups of porcelain. Of this immense network of electricity which enveloped in its close meshes the entire globe, as of that prodigious coat of mail with which the complicated system of railways clothed the earth, there was only left some scattered fragments, like the remnant of the Grand Army of Napoleon during the retreat from Russia.

Meanwhile, the glaciers of the Alps, the Andes, and of all the mountains of the world hitherto vanquished by the sun, which for several thousand centuries had been thrust back into their last entrenchments, resumed their triumphant march. All the glaciers that had been dead since the geological ages came to life again, more colossal than ever. From all the valleys in the Alps or Pyrenees, that were lately green and peopled with delightful health resorts, there issued these snowy hordes, these streams of icy lava, with their frontal moraine advancing as it spread over the plain, a moving cliff composed of rocks and overturned engines, of the wreckage of bridges, stations, hotels and public edifices, whirled along in the wildest confusion, a heart-breaking welter of gigantic bric-à-brac, with which the triumphant invasion decked itself out as with the loot of victory. Slowly, step by step, in spite of sundry transient intervals of light and warmth, in spite of occasionally scorching days which bore witness to the supreme convulsions of the sun in its battle against death, which revived in men's souls misleading hopes, athwart and even by means of these unexpected changes the pale invaders advanced. They retook and recovered one by one all their ancient realms in the glacial period, and if they found on the road some gigantic vagrant block lying in sullen solitude, near some famous city, a hundred leagues from its native hills, mysterious witness of the immense catastrophe of former times, they raised it and bore it onward, cradling it on their unyielding waves, as an advancing army recaptures and enfurls its ancient flags, all covered with dust, which it has found again in its enemies' sanctuaries.

But what was the glacial period compared with this new crisis of the globe and the sky? Doubtless it had been due to a similar attack of weakness, to a similar failure of the sun, and many species of animals had necessarily perished at the time, from being insufficiently clad. That had been, however, but a warning bell, so to say, a simple notification of the final and fatal attack. The glacial periods – for we know there have been several – now explained themselves by their reappearance on a large scale. But this clearing up of an obscure point in geology was, one must admit, an insufficient compensation for the public disasters which were its price.

What calamities! What horrors! My pen confesses its impotence to retrace them. Besides how can we tell the story of disasters which were so complete they often simultaneously overwhelmed under snow-drifts a hundred yards deep all that witnessed them, to the very last man. All that we know for certain is what took place at the time towards the end of the twenty-fifth century in a little district of Arabia Petræa.

Thither had flocked for refuge, in one horde after another, wave after wave, with host upon host frozen one on the top of another, as they advanced, the few millions of human creatures who survived of the hundreds of millions that had disappeared. Arabia Petræa had, therefore, along with the Sahara, become the most populous country of the globe. They transported hither by reason of the relative warmth of its climate, I will not say the seat of Government – for, alas! Terror alone reigned – but an immense stove which took its place, and whatever remained of Babylon now covered over by a glacier. A new town was constructed in a few months on the plans of an entirely new system of architecture, marvellously adapted for the struggle against the cold. By the most happy of chances some rich and unworked coal mines were discovered on the spot. There was enough fuel there, it seems, to provide warmth for many years to come. And as for food, it was not as yet too pressing a question. The granaries contained several sacks of corn, while waiting for the sun to revive and the corn to sprout again. The sun had certainly revived after the glacial periods; why should it not do so again? asked the optimists.

It was but the hope of a day. The sun assumed a violet hue. The frozen 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.