Histoire de quatre ans, 1997-2001

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Regarding the works, poems, dramas, and novels published in the editions of the cahiers prior to the founding of the cahiers and in the first three series of the cahiers, refer to the Sixth cahier of the fourth series, courier cahier, courier of Paris, inventory of the cahiers, in catalogue form, a cahier of 72 pages, one franc.

We shall publish in a cahier of the fifth series the summary list of works, poems, dramas, and novels published in the fourth series of our cahiers.

History of Four Years 1997 — 2001

All things stir, as though the world, once formed, wished to dissolve backward into chaos and night, and shape itself anew.

— Hermann and Dorothea, IX.

FIRST PART

“Farewell, comrades, farewell! We’re off!”

So cried Jean Schrader and Claude Touron, pounding with all their might on the closed doors that opened, every five meters, to the right and left of a long corridor.

Vague exclamations, sleepy and displeased voices answered the two young men who drummed and called without ceasing. A door opened and a man in his nightshirt appeared.

“Now that’s a farewell!” he said. “It’s barely five o’clock. Must no one sleep because you’re leaving!”

He looked with envy at Jean and Claude, whose two young and honest faces expressed a joy pleasant to behold; and he kept saying, rubbing his eyes:

“Lucky fellows! Lucky fellows!”

“Yes, we’re lucky fellows! Now then, bid us farewell: it’s time. Off to Paris!”

They embraced gaily before parting, then the two travelers went down the stairs. Jean proposed:

“Shall we stop by the laboratory? The old man is surely there, always the first one up.”

“Let’s go quickly,” replied Claude.

The two young men were going to spend some months at an establishment of advanced scientific studies at Bellevue, near Paris, and this was the cause of their contentment, for they were studious.

They crossed a vast and meticulously clean farmyard, open on one side to a broad valley at the bottom of which rolled the heavy swirls of a morning mist. Cows turned their eyes toward these hurried children, then majestically resumed their grazing. Jean and Claude spared neither a glance nor a thought for the familiar setting. They had been born on this slope of the Jura mountains. For eighteen years they had been growing up, working in this same Colony, and their joy was to get a little distance from it.

They made their way toward a small isolated building, a light and graceful construction whose metallic frame, entirely visible, enclosed courses of brick and facings of pink faience that glittered in the damp light.

They knocked on a door above which was written: LABORATORY.

“Come in!” answered a deep voice.

They entered. The room was dazzling with the whiteness and clarity reflected from every direction — the faience of the floor and walls, the marble of the tables, the bowls on the tables, the milk in the bowls.

“Comrade manager!” said Claude.

“One moment,” replied the comrade manager, who, bent over a fine lake of cream, was examining a small apparatus with minute attention.

The two young men stood motionless, breathing in the delicious smell.

“Ten, three-tenths,” murmured the man, after a pause.

He recorded the observation in a large register, then held out his hands to Claude and Jean.

“So you’re off, then? You have a year of good work ahead of you. Tillier will employ you as assistants. And then he’ll have you do practical exercises and summaries. There aren’t two like him for opening a beginner’s eyes. More than once, when I’m here bent over my bowls and test tubes, I think of him, thanks to whom I see so many things. Are you going straight to Paris, or through Besançon?”

“Through Besançon. We have a rendezvous with three comrades who will do a stint at Bellevue with us.”

“Besançon this morning!” said the chemist in a voice suddenly saddened. “It will be a hideous spectacle. What filth, these days of general elections! Here we’ll get Lombard through — that’s fairly certain. But elsewhere? When shall we have mastered this damned universal suffrage? Poor France! Always led by alcoholics and the unconscious!”

Jean and Claude listened with polite deference. Too young to entertain two thoughts at once, and given entirely to the joy of departure, they scarcely worried about these general elections that nevertheless threatened the country. The chemist noticed; he broke off his complaints:

“Well! You hardly think about that; so much the better for you. And you must be in a hurry. Farewell, children, and give my regards to Tillier.”

“We won’t fail to,” replied the two friends.

They shook the old man’s hand and went down at a quick and cheerful pace toward the valley. To right and left, the little houses where the married members of the community lived rose up like vague dolmens in the mist.

“They’re all sleeping,” remarked Jean. “We were right to say goodbye to them last night.”

They walked for half an hour. Then a white barrier crossed their path at the junction of another road. The young men stopped after crossing it. They had reached the boundary of their domains, and almost immediately the Besançon tramway arrived and stopped.

They boarded, and, barely seated, talked of the vast projects, the marvelous researches they were going to undertake. They discoursed with that vivacity, that intellectual naivety which lends grace to virile youth. They talked endlessly and did not spare a single glance for the landscape.

How grand and sad it was, though, this countryside they were passing through, and how it would have surprised the eyes of a man from the nineteenth century! It was deserted, like an immense bush. Sometimes one could make out, amid the trees, the ridges of a ruined steeple dominating the high walls of a church. Vestiges of habitations stood round about: it was the site of a former village.

How could such a transformation have been accomplished? One must tell this curious story in which chemistry plays more part than politics.

In 1925, the German Ziegler had succeeded in manufacturing albumin, an admirable organic substance for human nutrition; the processes he had discovered were very costly, without possibility of industrial application. But researchers in both hemispheres, spurred by the hope of an extraordinary and prodigiously profitable invention, applied themselves to the problem, and very quickly they found not one but three or four practical solutions. In 1929, a kilogram of albumin sold for 1 franc; in 1951, 0.75 franc; in 1952, 0.45 franc.

At first there had been an enthusiastic clamor. Humanity had thus vanquished the servitudes of the earth and the factory; it had achieved its emancipation. A worker could earn his living by working four, three, or two hours instead of eight, ten, or eleven. But soon it was a cry of dismay: the most sudden of revolutions was ruining society.

Bread and potatoes became luxury foods within three years, mere table amusements, and two vast forms of agriculture were abandoned. The villages were deserted and the cities overrun by an immense multitude: all the peasants, sixteen million beings out of the thirty-five million who then populated France. Competition debased wages and drove them so low that in 1933, in the great cities of Europe, it was considered good pay to receive two francs for ten hours of work. Paupers emigrated by the hundreds of thousands, not reflecting that in the United States and Australia the crisis was the same. These nations barred their entry and the steamships brought back the first to leave.

There were riots in every great city. Factories were set ablaze; engineers were massacred. Fires and massacres did not restore to the peasant the ancient work of the land. Human societies were disrupted in their traditional life by the lightning propagation of a chemical invention.

The demagogues, delighted by the windfall, filled the world with their voices. Supported by the formidable anger of the dispossessed agrarians, by the rancor of the deceived urban masses after unheard-of hopes, they denounced science, always allied with the Jews and manipulated by them; they denounced Siméon Kohnson, who, director and nearly sole proprietor of the albumin trust, was amassing a prodigious fortune amid universal disorder; they demanded that his factories be confiscated, that the manufacture of albumin be prohibited. But the urban masses opposed it.

Then the demagogues found something else: they demanded for each workday a minimum wage and a maximum duration. Furious demonstrations pressed Parliament, which voted in a single afternoon the law of six hours and six francs. But competition acted with more force and continuity than the law: neither did wages rise, nor did hours diminish.

Then the crowds proclaimed a new desire: “Free albumin!” they cried; and two factories were blown up in a single night. The socialists interpreted this obscure cry. “Nationalize albumin,” they said. And they introduced a bill that the Chamber and Senate voted at once. The trust of Siméon Kohnson was dispossessed without indemnity, and albumin was generously distributed to the indigent.

The measure had a happy success. The distributions softened the ferocity of competition. The State, directly interested in reducing the number of the indigent, used the monopoly’s profits to triple the corps of labor inspectors and rigorously apply the six-six law.

On the other hand, the workers’ unions recovered some strength, and certain among them obtained five-six or four-six rates. (1) The economic situation regained some stability, and life became tolerable.

(1) Such were the common abbreviations. The first figure designated the number of hours worked, the second the wage rate.

People congratulated themselves on the change. Life was easy, easier than it had ever been. Thanks to the reduction of working hours, leisure, that rare privilege of former times, had become a common thing. One would spend a few moments at the factory or office, then one was free. And so the number of places of pleasure had increased tenfold, and theaters played every day in matinee as well as evening. The quality of the shows was very low, morals greatly degraded; but people breathed, they amused themselves, rendered undemanding by the severity of the crisis they had weathered. The wise said: One must give this new public time to educate itself; it will do so. And there was no shortage of optimists who affirmed: We are nearing the goal. Pauperism is vanquished. True emancipation is at hand.

But people soon sensed that this peace was a respite, and that they were living over abysses. New ills were arising in this new humanity. Attention was first drawn to certain deformations of the sexual instinct, to a licentiousness at once obscene and refined, and everywhere widespread. Then one heeded the doctors who reported the increase in the number of the insane: from 55,378 in 1855, the figure had risen in 1900 to 87,428; in 1920 to 164,971; in 1930 to 256,001; in 1936 to 378,126; and at the same time they indicated the causes: first, and at the origin of all others, the vacancy of the mind caused by overly long rest periods; then, consequences of this primary cause: intoxication by alcohol, an ancient evil that was not progressing; intoxication by morphine and opium, which was penetrating with irresistible force into the very depths of society.

Certain moralists cried out: “Material progress moves too fast. One forbids automobiles excessive speeds; but it is science itself that must be slowed down.” This wish remained platonic. New technical processes were constantly being invented, and day by day rose that muddy wealth in which humanity seemed to be sinking.

It then appeared that the suppression of poverty, far from solving the problems of humanity, posed them all on the contrary, by constituting for the first time a real humanity. These multitudes, formerly destitute — what would they do with their idle souls and bodies? The use of leisure became the most pressing of social questions.

An elite recruited from among academics, doctors, craftsmen, mechanics, and chemists set an example in vain. They employed their free hours in varied exercises of culture, gymnastics, and music. Some had the idea of organizing free concerts where the works of Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, and Gluck were performed by amateur orchestras and choruses. They believed that the musical waves would have enough power to regenerate the masses. What an illusion! This elite was working for an elite. It alone benefited from the company of great men, and its influence was imperceptible in the enormous ambient degradation. Those who constituted it soon recognized this and resigned themselves to their isolation. They constantly gathered in their people’s houses, their popular universities, in the industrial or rural colonies they founded. They were called “libertarian socialists” because they asked nothing of the State but the freedom to organize as they pleased. They said: It is by example that one must instruct the unconscious. But no doubt example was not enough, for vices and defects continued to spread.

In 1945, a congress of learned societies, convened on the initiative of the doctors, published a manifesto in which the public perils were set forth with a certain solemnity: “We demand a law against alcohol, against morphine, against opium,” it concluded. “We demand to be heard. We, the scientists, are today the principal creators of wealth. We have the right, and toward humanity we have the duty, to govern scientifically the consumption of that wealth. Those who gravely deceive themselves, and will repent too late perhaps, are those who imagine they can benefit from our discoveries while repudiating our discipline.”

The libertarian socialists, setting aside all doctrinal differences, gave energetic support to the authoritarian scientists. The effort was serious. Pamphlets were distributed, lectures given. The legal prohibition of alcohol and narcotics was uniformly demanded.

If the propagandists had had only public opinion to convert, perhaps they would have succeeded, for opinion was weak. But they ran up against the ten or twenty financiers who exploited the degradation of the masses. The manufacture and trade of alcohol and morphine were entirely monopolized by the Rodrigue-Kohnson and Lefort trust. Kohnson was, moreover, absolute master of the music halls, theaters, and eight principal newspapers.

Directed by a few Jewish families, temperate and of good morals, this formidable administration was the instrument of European degeneration. It was child’s play for them to dampen the agitation of the hygienists. Ridiculed in the music halls, blamed in parliament, insulted by the press, they were quickly discredited.

The campaign had not been entirely in vain. It had rallied several hundred individuals, all of serious worth, who had affiliated themselves with the cultural societies, the communist colonies, the cooperatives of the libertarians.

But the effect on the masses remained imperceptible. Nothing could check the blind movement that was dragging them, throughout Europe, toward irremediable degradation, toward the various forms of death — slow death through debauchery, or swift death through Oriental poisons. The use of morphine was commonplace since an invention by Dr. Bourmont had attenuated its acute pathological consequences. The taste for opium was also avowed. The use of the terrible hashish remained a secret taste whose extent was difficult to gauge.

A Russian physiologist, Novgorod, invented stimulants by means of which one could die in spasms of joy after fifty hours of continuous eroticism. He was an austere man who published his discovery because a man of science, he thought, must publish everything. A financial company soon exploited this novelty, and in 1950, novgorodism reached epidemic proportions in Vienna. The police were indifferent and, besides, what could they have done? The simplicity of the processes imagined by Novgorod, the diffusion of chemical products and equipment, made control illusory. The cult of attractive death, euthanasia, forgotten since the Roman decadence, found its faithful again.

These frenzies had their poets, their philosophers, who opposed theory to theory. And why, they said, should the process toward life be worth more than the process toward death? Life is a conquest, an accumulation of forces, and reciprocally all pleasures are losses, slow exhalations that spend and let one savor the forces blindly accumulated by life. Why this imposition of an eternal discipline, which never authorizes what all our instincts call for: pleasure? We affirm the superiority of release over tension, of dissolution over organization. We affirm that life has no meaning except through pleasure — that is to say, flowering — the harbinger of death.

A few individuals, neuropaths, epileptics, cured tubercular patients, gifted by their very degeneration with a sensitivity that was exquisitely acute, corrupted poetry, music, painting, and even sculpture. The pure invention of the Greeks — art, the visible form of virtue — they transformed into a mortal poison saturated with bitterness. At the bottom of their sadism lay an irremediable disorder, an interruption of the vital instinct. The most gifted among them, a Bouhours, a Marolle, expressed this melancholy with poignant intensity. They were heading toward death through pleasure, and logically they were led to euthanasic practices: they drew their readers along.

The asylums, however vast and multiplied, could not accommodate all the idiots and madmen one encountered wandering through the streets, as one encountered drunkards in the nineteenth century. They circulated unnoticed. In 1972, those at Limoges bludgeoned their keepers, invaded the city twelve hundred strong, pillaged the alcohol and morphine shops, disarmed a post, beat the police, ran to the Institute of Obligatory Regeneration (as prisons were then called), and freed two thousand thieves. Cannon had to be sent to put down the frightful insurrection of all the degenerates.

Public opinion being greatly alarmed, the libertarian socialists and the positivist scientists thought it opportune to publish together a manifesto in which they recalled their declarations of 1945. They repeated their warnings, their admonitions.

The first reception was favorable; the ideas put forward were heard. But it was a movement of opinion and of conversation, nothing more. This humanity had become incapable of following a thought, of accepting an influence. It slipped away, it fled like a fluid.

The Rodrigue-Kohnson and Lefort trust soon reasserted its mastery. The journalists created a diversion. A sadistic crime had just been committed. They published, they magnified its details. All public attention was brought back to the personality of the murderer. His biography, his portraits at every age, his intimate letters, which publishers fought over at enormous prices, filled the newspapers and the booksellers’ windows. The hero remained unfindable and the amateurs were desolate at the thought of missing such a fine trial. But a journalist succeeded where the police failed. He found the man, hid him in a secret place, and in exchange for his freedom made him write his memoirs. The installments, simultaneously published in Russian, German, English, and French, were distributed in more than a million copies. Luther, hidden in the Wartburg, had stirred the world less with his manifestos than this hero of crime with the tale of his experiences.

The events at Limoges were forgotten, and the general elections of 1973 sent to the Chambers the same immutable majority of “liberal populists,” demagogues bought by the trust, who lived on the common degradation.

The minority watched more than it participated in the incoherent debates. They resolved to make it pay dearly for the fear it had momentarily inspired. They persecuted its associations by turning against them the laws crafted by the nineteenth-century republicans to contain the clerical organization: revocable declarations, accretion duties, prohibition of teaching and founding establishments, etc. All was in vain: the methods that had succeeded against incapable and superstitious monks could not weaken the socialist cooperators. They continued to supply virtually all the learned personnel society needed. Their women always administered the hospitals and schools. Their establishments never ceased to develop despite the obstacles. Whatever was attempted against them, they remained powerful, for the simple reason that they were the indispensable elite. Constantly the best joined them and entered their colonies, as the wise, in the Middle Ages, entered communities — but for work, not for prayer.

A new group supported them. Serious Catholics had formed it. Obliged to break with the wretched remnants of the Roman Church, disfigured by sorcery, they had formed a dissident Church, directed by a council of three bishops. Schismatics, they redeemed themselves through doctrinal orthodoxy. They professed a theology entirely Augustinian and Jansenist; they believed in the radical wickedness of men, in the absolute value of the sacraments conferred by the priest, in the necessity of gratuitous grace for salvation. This lugubrious faith, which had frightened the Christians of the seventeenth century, seemed acceptable to certain free-thinkers of the twentieth. A number of families joined these “Old Catholics,” who had established the center of their Church in a cooperative colony at Port-Royal-des-Champs. Separated from the libertarian socialists by theory but brought together by practice, they maintained relations of esteem with them.

Isolated by the necessity of things, because they were different and superior, this imposed solitude was for these few thousand individuals a blessing that made them more different, more superior still. Animated by the contempt that nearly all other men inspired in them, happy to be so elevated, ambitious to rise still higher, they sought within themselves alone new reasons for living, and found them. They strengthened themselves through discipline in a world being swept along by dissolution. They took pleasure in their activity and in themselves, in a humanity that seemed to appreciate nothing but diversion. Faithful to their past, masters of their passions, brave before the future, they realized a true human existence. They practiced virtue, that wonder of art and reality so long unrecognized.

This renaissance of heroic sentiment had brought about the restoration of a forgotten type — the sage of antiquity, the saint of the Middle Ages. Each colony had its philosophers, its masters of life. They rendered to those around them the same services that in other times, to their friends, to their few pupils, those great forces barely or badly used — a Théophile Dufour, a Vacherot, a Bersot, a Bixio, a Lagneau, a Pécaut — might have rendered. They knew how to meditate, and in society it is necessary that some meditate for all, for meditation is a task that takes a whole life, and not everyone can give theirs to it. Sober writers, they taught through example and speech the integral experience in which the soul gives itself with the body, the purity of pleasure bound to the act like fragrance to the flower, the creative virtue of life. People surrounded them, listened to them. They gathered these words that seemed to come from so far, they observed, they imitated their vital habits. In death, they received a sort of cult. Small monuments, placed in the garden or the common hall, perpetuated their memory. At the agricultural colony of Saint-Éverest (Forez), they preciously kept the scraps of paper on which Clément Vallon, rendered mute by cancer, had penciled what he wished to say to his friends. On the pedestal of his bust they had engraved the last of these lines: “At the hour of death we possess only what we have given.”

The glory of these individuals was considerable because the need for them was felt by all. The naive faith of the nineteenth century in a sort of materialist Providence that would have carried men toward the better, having been ruined by facts, all, or nearly all, judged that good is a creation of man, who must not oppose nature but add to it, as the sculptor’s genius adds to the block of marble. Thus the sage had recovered the elevated place that normally belongs to him, as the most useful.

Nowhere, except perhaps in the cities of primitive Greece, was existence better regulated than in certain cooperative colonies: cobblers of Amiens, watchmakers of the Doubs, stockmen of the Jura, woodcutters and woodcarvers of the Nièvre. Manual labor, alternating with intellectual work, kept their faculties in balance. The refinement of the mind entailed no physical degeneration, and happiness grew with consciousness.

Despite restrictive laws, the members raised their children, who received an admirable education, and these children, become adults, married among themselves, forming noble couples who perpetuated a tradition, and perhaps were beginning a race. Their magnificent health kept sadness away, and neither the uncertainty nor the ugliness of the times ever slowed their energy.

What future could these few thousand men hope for? Would they set themselves up as an aristocracy of intelligence and will, seizing power through slow imposition? This prospect of reigning over an asylum of degenerates was their best hope. But they feared, and rightly so, the caprices of those malicious multitudes who detested their superiority. At each consultation of universal suffrage, they saw a majority return more hateful, more passionate against them, and each time they asked themselves: Will we be crushed by taxes and laws of exception? Are we condemned?

On the day this story begins, they were waiting with a shade of anxiety. That very evening they would learn the result of these general elections, which might give crushing force to the “liberal populist” agitators. Their designs were known: they wished to bar access to all public functions, and first to teaching positions, to members of closed associations. Such a measure would have roughly dealt with what little genuine civilization had been saved.

SECOND PART

“Here is Besançon: we’ve arrived,” said Touron, interrupting a demonstration by his friend.

The tramway turned into a street whose houses, a third ruined, presented a lamentable aspect. The rare passers-by had a feeble air, like certain inhabitants of malarial regions where fever rages. Claude and Jean observed in silence.

The tramway stopped and they got off, looking for the People’s House, which they knew to be nearby. They soon spotted it: its inviting facade made a pleasant contrast among the others. Yet they saw, approaching, that a shutter hung in a lamentable fashion, and that nearly all the windows were broken.

“Look at that!” said Jean. “It looks like they’ve withstood a siege.”

The manager of the house, standing on the threshold, hailed them in a sonorous voice:

“Come in, young men! You’re known to me! I’ve often seen you at your dairy when I pass by on my rounds. You’re looking at my facade? Isn’t it lovely! All the riffraff came last night to smash my windows, coming out of a liberal populist meeting. And if we hadn’t been here, fifteen comrades with our revolvers, I believe they’d have demolished the shop.”

“Things are going well for you in Besançon!” said Claude Touron.

“They were shouting I don’t know what — real madman’s talk. It seems that quite a few people died yesterday at the hospital. Every day, for that matter, they die in droves — these alcoholics, these degenerates are worth less than a fly. But yesterday, it seems, they were dying even faster than usual; and the old women have gotten it into their heads to say that it’s the doctors’ fault, who want to poison poor people to get it over with faster. Madness, I tell you; but madness takes hold with madmen, and you see the result.”

“Poisoning people! That’s a story from the Middle Ages.”

“This riffraff is worse than ever. And yet, their poison idea — I find it rather good. If I could toss them all a poison pill, I believe I’d do it. Look at that!” he said, pointing at two emaciated individuals passing by. “They drag their misery around, they drag suffering around! We are thirty thousand Bisontins in Besançon. That’s twenty-six thousand too many. — Have you had breakfast this morning, young men? Come in, let me put some heart in you.”

He seated them and poured two full bowls of milk.

“You have time. You’re taking the ten-forty train, the Paris express. Your traveling companions, who are going with you to study chemistry, arrived last night. They slept here — here they come down.”

They appeared indeed: three young men, a young woman, and the manager made the introductions. For a few minutes there was a rapid exchange of words. They named each one’s colony, discovered mutual friends, then, acquaintance made, ate in silence. The manager was reading a newspaper.

“But, but!” he suddenly said, “it looks serious, this illness at the hospital.”

One of the young men replied:

“It was the same in Lyon last month: the hospice was a quarter emptied. And last night’s demonstrations — what does your newspaper say?”

“Let me look… it regrets the excesses… oh, the fine hypocrites! This isn’t a liberal populist newspaper, mind you; it’s a progressive one, rather moderate. And it’s polite with those brutes from last night. I read: ‘Certainly the violent acts of our amiable population found an excuse, a strong excuse, in certain odious words to which the mysterious epidemic that grieves us lends a singular import.’ The ‘odious words’ refer to a quip by a comrade who said what we all think, namely that the rotters would do much better to die a bit faster and make room.”

“For us,” finished Jean with a laugh.

A voice was heard from the street crying:

“Down with the assassins!”

And a stone fell on the table where breakfast was being served. The young men leaped to their feet and ran to the door. They caught the fleeing individual, chastised him with cuffs, then came back chatting.

“We’ve seen it before, we’ll see it again, and it’ll pass,” said the manager. “I have confidence. The masses buck like a vicious horse that wants to throw its rider. The rider — that’s us. It doesn’t look like it, but we’re the masters. Look what happened to the Jura Tramway Company. It tried to run without the union comrades. It recruited a staff, a fine crew, scabs, real yellow-bellied scabs! They came from Brittany, Italy, and Belgium; there were five hundred, and not one worker among them. The tramways derailed, the machines broke — there were complaints throughout the region. The company came back to the union, humbled, but forced. And the comrades do what they want. I tell you, they need us: and therefore we are the masters.”

“The Chamber they’re electing today will be worse than the last,” said Jean.

The manager gave a joyous laugh.

“The Chamber! You’re young. Do you think that exists, the Chamber? Let the good folk go vote and elect whom they please! As for me, I’ll go walking in the fields with my wife and my two daughters — that’s more serious.”

The new friends departed at the appointed hour. Gathered in the same compartment, they talked. Politics was the first subject of their conversation; they spoke of it with an inexperience that their naive gravity made all the more apparent. An instructed listener would doubtless have recognized, through their imprecise words, the echo of the most recent controversies.

“What’s needed,” said a child of seventeen whose candid eyes were set in the magnificent arches of a vast forehead standing straight as a wall, “what’s needed is that the scientific committees compel the Chambers to decide certain things.”

Claude Touron replied:

“But then we’d be giving power to the scientists, and that must not be.”

Claire Vuillemot — that was the young woman’s name — echoed in an indignant voice:

“No, it must not be; they would become new masters.”

And Claude went on:

“Look at men like Benjamin Raband; that’s very dangerous.”

Benjamin Raband was the leader of the authoritarian positivists. Chemist and biologist, eminent hygienist, he had been led by his research on cellular life and pathology to an exact knowledge of the principal laws of heredity. His Manual of Zootechnics (of breeding, to use a blunt word) was held to be a definitive work. Certain of possessing the rules that would have ensured the indefinite elevation of his species, Benjamin Raband had given himself over with a kind of impetuosity to his despotic tendencies. At the mere word “liberty,” he grew irritated. His imagination constantly represented to him the genial humanity he was ready to fashion, and he felt toward his adversaries the fury of an artist forbidden his art. His disciples, numerous and vehement like him, had inscribed on the pediment of the positivist temples the motto of counter-revolutionary humanism: DISCIPLINE-HIERARCHY-LOVE. The Jacobinism of the Rabandists had had the effect of compromising that alliance of libertarians and positivists whose possibility nearly a century of experience had demonstrated.

“Yes,” answered the child with candid eyes, “Benjamin Raband — I’m not defending him; but not all scientists are like him — Tillier, for example…”

Indeed, Tillier, director of the College of Advanced Scientific Studies where our students were heading, had spoken out against the authoritarian theses of Raband and the positivists. He had always maintained good relations, not (that goes without saying) with the degraded democracy of universal suffrage, but with the organized democracy of the workers’ associations. Tillier was moreover relatively isolated in the scientific world, where his opinions did not prevail.

The conversation shifted. The young people talked about their occupations, the particular customs of the colonies where they had lived; each, indeed, had its institutions, its innovations of which it was proud. Claude Touron questioned Claire Vuillemot.

“Comrade,” he said, “are you not from the beekeeping association of Poligny?”

It was an association renowned for the excellence of its food products, for its publications on the habits of bees, and finally for the number of distinguished men and scientists it had produced over forty years.

“Indeed,” answered Claire Vuillemot, with a movement of pride that animated her gaze and colored her cheeks.

“Recently, a passing lecturer at our colony spoke of your schools; he greatly interested us.”

“I can inform you: I’m a monitor,” she said. “Our directress wanted to revolutionize the system of large classes — barrack-classes, she calls them — where one teacher is alone with thirty or forty children. She asked us young women if we would help her. We accepted. There are twenty of us who give one morning out of two for the children of the lower class — twenty young women for sixty children. The children choose their own monitor and work with her on what they like best. I taught natural history. For common studies — languages, mathematics — the large classes are reformed. Our directress always says that there are two parts to education: training in discipline, for which children must be gathered together, and the cultivation of talent, for which they must be left to group themselves. There,” she concluded, a little intimidated by so long a speech.

“But you’re going to be hampered by last month’s circular, which prohibits private schools?”

“Oh!” said Claire Vuillemot sadly, “that is my worry. Let us hope the elections won’t be too bad.”

There was a silence. Jean Schrader and Pierre Vimeu were reading. Claire Vuillemot watched the scrubby countryside through which the rapid and gentle gliding of the car was carrying them.

From Combs-la-Ville on, the houses pressed ever more closely together, like so many cabins juxtaposed, with their unkempt gardens and the rectangular belt of their walls formidably defended by bristling broken glass. Paris had spread like a leprosy over the parks of the once-charming Yères valley. The electric tramways had scattered the population of city and suburb over an enormous expanse of sullied countryside.

The car crossed spacious avenues, solitary and sad despite it being a Sunday. Popular festivals, still so good and genuine at the beginning of the century, had fallen into disuse. To tell the truth, the people — that great childlike being who had served as a foundation of health for past civilizations — no longer existed. All the extremes of the old humanity had merged into a single type, very similar to the clerk of the nineteenth century — a feeble pleasure-seeker dressed as a bourgeois. This race scorned the intoxication of wine that makes one sing and sought silent drunkenness and indoor vices.

It was half past six when the young people descended the ramps of the Gare de Lyon. They deliberated: would they go straight to Bellevue? Would they stay in Paris until nine or ten o’clock to learn the election results with the crowd? The temptation was great; they stayed.

As soon as they had dined, they made their way toward the center. Curiosity animated all six, and without even knowing it they walked a little fast, moved by the prospect of finally seeing this extraordinary city that had given the world its loftiest thoughts and its most refined corruptions.

The aspect of the boulevards was grandiose. The interlaced branches of the trees joined in the shape of an ogive above the roadway, and in place of the bare, crowded houses of old, immense hotels rose, surrounded by spacious gardens, where the wealthy foreigners of five continents flocked toward pleasure. Of Paris, they loved the art, the manners, and above all the marvelous practices of sensuality. Paris, in that respect, had remained the unique city. The instinct of sensuality, diminished in other countries by the use of Oriental poisons, had not faltered there. Woman had retained all her animal charm.

The six young puritans advanced through a strange crowd that jostled them and sometimes separated them; they rejoined one another immediately with anxious haste. They opened wide their troubled eyes and looked without understanding. They did not know how to breathe this subtle air, charged with amorous scents and intellectual emanations. Eight o’clock had struck; the majestic July afternoon was expiring in an equivocal light made of electricity, gas, and sun.

Jean Schrader, walking beside Claire Vuillemot, heard her murmur a few syllables. He thought she had spoken to him, and, questioning:

“You were saying?”

“I wasn’t saying anything,” she answered, and her voice was full of melancholy. “I was thinking: the poor wretches!”

“Yes, the poor wretches!”

When they reached the end of the Rue Royale, the Place de la Concorde, with its white clarity, drew them. They crossed the vast space. But when they arrived at the foot of the Champs-Élysées, they stopped suddenly. Never had they seen, never imagined, anything so beautiful.

How beautiful it was indeed, the mighty city! The triumphal monument stood out in the distance against the red sky, its open arch silhouetted; a shimmering of lights, of murmurs, stole through the foliage of the century-old trees; rockets rose and curved in the air, rustling; showers of gold fell silently. Something of the grandeur of the ancestors had passed into the corruption of the sons.

The young people, made silent by admiration, exchanged a glance: they were thinking of the city of the nineteenth century, and, the pride of the past making more cruel the sadness of the present, they advanced without a word along the grandiose avenue that Frenchmen of another age had laid out for another humanity.

They passed the singing cafés and arenas, the Palace of Blood, the Colosseum, renowned for their cruel spectacles, and the House of Dreams, renowned for its obscene attractions. Girls, sometimes with charming bodies, brushed past them and fixed upon them for a moment the sad interrogation of their widened eyes. One of them, very young, whose little soul was intoxicated by the multitude of lights and the rhythm of the refrains vibrating in the breeze, took three skipping steps, then stopped short against Pierre Vimeu, whom she bumped slightly. He looked at her, and she, finding him provincial and nice-looking, laughed in his face and called him:

“Silly!”

The young men advanced a few more steps. Then, anxious not to embarrass the young woman who accompanied them, they silently turned around.

They returned to the boulevards, which were crowded with a nervous and vicious mob. The election results were beginning to come in, and the news as it arrived was written in letters of fire on the balcony of the Palace of Newspapers. More than twenty incumbent deputies, positivists or libertarian socialists, had been defeated. The liberal populists were returning everywhere with increased majorities.

At each proclaimed victory, the crowd responded with more furious barking. It grew drunk on its triumph like a brute intoxicated by striking. It repeated the names of the victors and howled:

“Down with the socios!”

The young people listened. They had been born, they had grown up in rural communities, and for the first time they felt the contact of a crowd. They instinctively drew back, and chance brought them alongside a small group of libertarian socialists who had taken refuge apart, in the shadow of a street corner.

Banal observations were exchanged in low voices: — The scum triumphs again! — What will they do? — Nothing, of course! Are they capable? — They’ll do something; listen to how they shout! — It’s been a hundred years! — They’ll close our schools, you’ll see; they’ll exclude our teachers. — Let them try!

For an hour the young people listened to these remarks and shouts. The scene seemed horrible and compelling to them. That dark mass stirring confusedly, flowing and ebbing like mud being pushed; those empty eyes, those stupid and furious physiognomies, struck them like something loathsome. Yet they stayed. Touron finally said:

“We must leave, or we’ll arrive too late at Bellevue.”

Claire Vuillemot, who seemed more affected than the others, gazed long at this crowd.

“The poor wretches!” she murmured. And she followed her companions.

At that same moment, newspaper vendors invaded the roadway, offering a new edition. People fought over their copies, grouped together to read: So-and-so, so many votes; another, so many… They studied the runoffs, calculated the votes by the dozen, and no one, it seemed, read or attached the slightest importance to a short dispatch, worded thus:

“Villejuif Hospital, nine o’clock. — Eighty-three patients have just been struck by a strange and fulminant illness. Ten have died and the condition of most of the others is desperate. There are rumors that cases have broken out in the countryside. The administration believes it to be a poisoning.”

When they had crossed, an hour later, the gate of the College of Advanced Scientific Studies, the young people were relieved. The dazzling cleanliness of the walls, the flowers in the window-boxes, the dignified grace of the student who greeted them — everything brought them back to a familiar setting.

They were shown into the salon, from which came sounds of laughter and music. People were dancing. The couples stopped to welcome the new arrivals. They were seated, questioned. Where did they come from? Why so late? They had despaired of seeing them. They told how curiosity had detained them in Paris: The elections! The telephone informed Bellevue, and the news did not hinder the dances. What did a Parliament matter?

The conversation did not go on long. As soon as the travelers had consumed a few cups of chamomile, they were led to their rooms, for they were dusty and seemed weary.

The next morning, at the earliest hour, each of them received a brief note: Vincent Tillier was inviting them to breakfast with him.

Tillier was a man of fifty. In the course of his life he had greatly enjoyed his work and greatly suffered through his affections. Barely thirty, he had lost in an automobile accident his young wife and his only daughter.

Tillier had always been a hard worker; his resource against despair was a redoubling of fervor at work. Aided by a dozen students, in less than seven years he compiled that admirable systematic bibliography of the chemical sciences, a work before which German patience had recoiled. He believed he could allow himself a little rest after this long effort, and he tried to relax. But he immediately perceived that his sorrow was whole in his heart: the faces of the two dead women accompanied him always. He understood that henceforth his sadness would never leave him, and he accepted this destiny. He would suffer, he would work, and constantly he would hear the two incessant voices of life: one plaintive and lamentable, which prolongs destruction; the other glorious and rejuvenating, which echoes every creation and restores broken hearts. He asked for and obtained the directorship of the laboratory of plant chemistry founded at Bellevue around 1880 by Marcellin Berthelot. He immediately undertook to transform it in a manner suited to his tastes, which were those of an organizer rather than an inventor. He resolved to add to it a college of advanced scientific studies to which workers’ unions and producers’ associations would send their most promising members. Tillier saw in this institution a means of more closely uniting those two worlds of knowledge and labor where all human nobility had concentrated, and thus of strengthening the influence of that higher culture he loved above all. He traveled across France, visited and convinced the principal socialist administrators, secured the necessary funding, and after eighteen months of diplomacy had the joy of receiving a first group of fifteen students in the annex built for this purpose.

The new college succeeded admirably and took all of Vincent Tillier’s energy. He worked vigorously and demanded from all the observance of his rigorous methods. The occupations were incessant and regulated. The morning belonged to courses, the afternoon to individual research and practical work; at the end of each day, the students, gathered under the chief’s direction, presented and discussed some of the results obtained. The most interesting findings were recorded in the semiannual Annals of the college. The evening was left for songs, dances, and games.

Thus lived Tillier and his students, with a regularity that made the days pass and gave work its full fruitfulness and sweetness. The students were happy. Tillier, had he been able to be happy, would have been. But he always felt his inner fracture. The small facts of life, when they touched him, gave a doubtful sound, like a hammer falling on a cracked bell; and when he found himself each evening alone at table, he was surprised not to feel discouraged: that feeling was quite unknown to him. “It’s like a gap in me,” he would think, smiling through his sadness — “a fortunate gap.”

The next day, at the agreed hour, the young people made their way to Tillier’s house. Very simple, and unchanged since Berthelot had built it in the nineteenth century, it stood at the top of the hill, overlooking a sloping orchard that let glimpses appear, through its greenery, of the immense expanse of Paris, bristling with spires and domes: seen from far and from above, the old city had a grand air.

Tillier appeared on the porch of the modest entrance, and seeing the newcomers, went straight to them. Deep, gentle eyes and an affable smile humanized his strange face, which looked as though it had been carved with a spade from some clod of hard earth.

“We expected you last night for dinner,” he said, “but our capital held you back, it seems.”

“We wanted to learn the election results in Paris,” said Touron.

“Oh! These elections… how people exaggerate the importance of such things. Parliamentary majorities — I hardly believe in them: other forces decide. Let us go to breakfast, if you will.”

There were twelve at table: Tillier had invited, along with the six newcomers, his secretary Raoul Herdey and four of his best students: Anatole Bergougnan, Pierre Coudroit, Vittoria Vivanti, an Italian, and Bezoukoff, a Russian. Introductions made, they sat down. The various courses had been laid out simultaneously on the white, flower-strewn tablecloth: eggs, dairy, green vegetables, albumin patties with coffee, fruit and honey. Each served himself as he pleased, for there were no servants in the establishment.

“Oh! Mademoiselle,” said Herdey, addressing Claire, “you won’t find here the milk or the honey of your mountains. How good it is, your honey! And your gingerbread! One must eat it fresh from the oven, still warm! What a treat!”

“Aren’t you from Poligny, Mademoiselle?” asked Vittoria Vivanti.

“Indeed.”

“I know your colony, and we all know it in Italy through the books it has produced — very fine books on beekeeping, very fine!”

“Remarkably accurate,” said Bergougnan.

“We try to work with method,” answered the young woman, pink with joy and flustered as if she herself had been praised.

Vincent Tillier listened in silence. Deliberately he fixed his gaze on whichever one was speaking — a gaze somewhat intense, that seemed held by a continual search. He took pleasure in seeing these young people. He liked their frank voices, their clear complexions, their easy manners; he liked to find in them those qualities that the twentieth century, after the nineteenth, had slowly unlearned: the taste for action and courtesy, for decency and gaiety, for energy and balance — the taste, in all things, for a strong and graceful rectitude. He asked:

“I hear that new pedagogical methods have been tried at Poligny; could you describe them to me, Mademoiselle?”

The young woman repeated with good grace the explanations she had given the day before on the train, and when she had finished:

“That is excellent,” answered Tillier. “To think that in France we still cling to the system of one teacher for thirty children!”

Vittoria Vivanti and Bergougnan asked for further details. Claire answered them all. They spoke of the colony’s laboratory, and of the old poet Jussieu, who, born in the colony, was happily finishing his life there, to the delight of all.

“How good your accounts are to hear, Mademoiselle!” said Tillier. “In your colonies, you libertarian socialists, you know how to live — you are taut… and it is tension that men lack. They think they can enjoy life, enjoy it passively… what idolatry! Life — that does not exist. One tries to seize it: but it’s a phantom, and one falls. Life must be resurrected, created at each instant — work, in a word. One truly enjoys only the trouble one has taken.”

Herdey intervened:

“The error,” he said, “I understand it. It’s a sort of optical illusion. The situation of men today is quite strange, pitiful. Not only are they deprived of instinct, when all animals have it — it is much worse. They have instincts that deceive them. They have remained, have they not, identically as nature shaped them over three or four hundred thousand years. They have instincts that incline them to eat well, sleep well, prefer pleasant things. And these tastes were harmless for wretches whom life pressed terribly, and who had few sweet things to choose from. But here, in barely two centuries, we scientists have transformed reality, diminished dangers, attenuated sufferings, multiplied pleasures. Result: our instincts miss their mark; they make us stumble blindly in a nature for which they were not made.”

Herdey fell silent; then, as no one responded, he continued:

“Consider,” he said, “there is one effort for which nature had given us the habit and almost the instinct — the warlike effort. For war, humanity roused itself from its apathy. And for a hundred years there has been no fighting. Our only heroic instinct has become useless. For my part, I pity men: they are poor creatures disoriented in the new world of science.”

One of the newcomers, who until then had timidly listened, ventured:

“But then,” he said, “those naturists who renounce machines and plow the earth — would they be right?”

“Can one go backward?” replied Tillier. “We no longer have a choice. We must transform ourselves to adapt to this new world of science that Herdey speaks of. Transform ourselves: determine new instincts, increase virtue — the enterprise is more difficult than the harnessing of external forces. Ourselves: what a difficult object; a consciousness so superficial, images that flee, motives that are unaware of themselves, aspirations that contradict one another, and desires — above all, desires of weakness, our most ancient instincts that oppose the necessary task. Ourselves: an object, a subject; an object always in flight, a subject always in revolt. Nature is convenient: it stays in our flasks. But ourselves! And what a vain game is ours, we scientists, if we are only scientists, occupied in mastering forces only to cast them at random into that abyss of weaknesses — the consciousness, or rather the unconsciousness, of men! That is where the work must be done today!”

Bergougnan raised his grave, square face.

“I do not believe in success,” he said.

“And why not?”

“Humanity is poorly balanced — too much intelligence, too little character. The disparity will keep growing and there will be a catastrophe at the end.”

“How swift your predictions are!” replied Tillier. “Humanity — think what a multitude of beings it contains, how many races, how many possibilities; and think how many catastrophes it has weathered, from the great flood to the degradation of today, which is also a catastrophe. It survived the famines of the old regime. Why not the present surfeit?”

“It is far more dangerous. To simplify the case: take a man who has long been poorly fed — poorly but healthily — and provide him with a good diet: in ten days you restore him. Take on the contrary a man who has fed to excess. Nothing can be done. His organs are deteriorated forever. He is a degenerate, and you know, Herdey, you who are a physician, that one does not restore a degenerate. To die of hunger is unpleasant but not bad for one’s health.”

Bezoukoff, the Slav with Kalmyk features, raised an irritated face in which two small eyes blinked.

“You don’t understand!” he cried. “Will you never understand? There are new forces, for consciousness as for nature. Who knew, a hundred and fifty years ago, about Hertzian waves? They give us energy, light, today. Well, there are psychic waves, I tell you… one can grasp them in the deep states of hypnosis; I myself have grasped them; and that is where one must search. But you refuse to understand! You say: it’s occultism, and you shrug your shoulders.”

“We believe,” explained Tillier gently, “that you mistake for a force what is a combustion of nervous reserves; your method—”

Bezoukoff interrupted:

“Words! What is a combustion? What is a reserve? What does that signify — nervous?”

He paled, his hands trembled. The spectacle of this anger affected the diners, and there was a painful silence. Tillier rose from the table, for the meal was finished.

At that moment a gong sounded, and as all passed into the adjoining room, the duty student appeared. He held in his hands a calling card, which he handed to Tillier.

“M. Blaise de Bruyère, of the Evening Dispatch, asks to have a word with you.”

“What does he want?”

“He speaks of an interview about this illness.”

“Oh! This illness they were talking about yesterday… it did seem curious. Let him come; he’ll give us the news.”

M. Blaise de Bruyère was soon introduced. He entered, hat in hand, with tiny steps and circular bows. He was a small, gaunt man. He resembled those insects whose entire face consists of two eyes round as balls surmounting large mandibles; he was very ugly. Tillier went to him:

“You’ve come to question me about this illness, it seems? But you’ll have to inform me first, monsieur, for I’m not up to date.”

“Haven’t you read the newspapers this morning?”

“No.”

“But it’s dreadful, monsieur! More than five hundred people died last night. Terror is everywhere.”

The poor man did indeed seem very frightened. He clutched a newspaper in his feverish hands. Tillier took it and opened it. It was a sort of enormous bundle, a tangle of twelve pages stuck together. There was no article properly speaking, but a multitude of small dispatches, each preceded by a large headline and an image that nearly spared the reader the trouble of reading. Tillier, lost in this jumble, asked:

“Where is your news?”

“Here — the latest,” said the little man, and he arranged his sheets with a deft hand.

“Let’s see the numbers,” murmured Tillier. “Such-and-such asylum… it always begins in the asylums… this asylum, Ville-Évrard, forty-two deaths, eight percent; Villebon, seven percent; Saint-Germain, eleven percent… all these deaths among the hospitalized; the staff unharmed.”

“The staff is almost always temperate,” Herdey interjected. “It seems the disease strikes exclusively the degenerates.”

“The symptoms,” continued Tillier: “internal heat, thirst, gangrene of the extremities indicated by blue spots under the nails… how singular! It reminds me of Vermorel’s work. Monsieur de Bruyère, as for me, I know nothing. But get yourself a book by Dr. Vermorel, published two weeks ago, entitled Observations on Some Recent Cases of Abnormal Pathology. Everything you read there accords strangely with, and to a certain extent foretells, your news of today.”

“But haven’t you a general assessment?”

“I can only tell you what Vermorel has not written but says in conversation: he believes it possible that an unknown disease may appear and harshly eliminate the enfeebled whom we treat in our hospitals. Such an event, monsieur, would not be altogether a misfortune. Death is a good educator — or more precisely, the fear of death.”

“You must be joking…”

“No, monsieur, I am not joking,” answered Tillier with sudden vehemence. “These deaths you bring me news of — I speak of them without irony, but without pity, I declare to you. What, monsieur! For a hundred years you and your kind have been floundering, sinking into the admirable world that we scientists, and we alone, had invented; you are destroying yourselves with your follies and destroying at the same time what we had created; and when you are punished, must we feel pity? It is impossible. You have chosen intoxication, ecstasy — suffer the consequences. Listen: I recall a powerful idea expressed at the end of the nineteenth century by the German Nietzsche. In certain cases, he said, a nihilist philosophy can be useful, like a mighty hammer, to break the dying races, cast them out of the way and open the road to a new order of life by satisfying the degenerates in their desire for death. This idea I hand over to you, monsieur, and apply it. Repeat it, then, to your readers. They scorned our counsel, repudiated our discipline. The epidemic that announces itself may satisfy their desire for death.”

“Your commission shall be done, monsieur, have no doubt,” said the journalist, quite pale.

He withdrew; and in the brief silence that followed his departure, Bezoukoff rose and likewise left.

“Bezoukoff doesn’t seem very pleased,” remarked one of the comrades.

And another, who was seated next to Jean Schrader, said by way of explanation:

“Bezoukoff is a spiritist, a morphine addict, we believe — like almost all the Russians who come here to study.”

Indeed, after the great effort of emancipation it had made at the beginning of the twentieth century, Western Russia, crushed under a flood of barbarous militias — Kurds, Circassians, Afghans, and Mongols — had given way. Mysticism had consoled the vanquished revolutionaries, and a multitude of sects, silently spread, had each carved out their domain in the irremediably sealed Oriental prison.

SECOND PART

The evening newspapers published frightful dispatches. Sent from every corner of France and Europe, they all said the same thing: the disease has appeared; so many struck, just as many dead. Almost always the epidemic had broken out in the asylums for the insane and the exhausted. In more than one case it had wrought devastating destruction: at Nuremberg, Haarlem, Innsbruck, Como, Reggio, Senlis, Le Mans, virtually all the hospitalized had been struck within hours by a loathsome decomposition.

People bought the newspapers feverishly and gathered in the street to read them. Questions and answers crisscrossed, but briefly and as if held back by fear. The simultaneous explosion of the plague terrified. No doubt the disease had long been incubating before acquiring its force and flight. After the dispatches, they read Tillier’s interview: “Repeat it to your readers: they scorned our counsel, repudiated our discipline; the epidemic that announces itself may satisfy their desire for death…” Then murmurs arose:

“They won’t accept their defeat of yesterday, the sectarians! — They are hateful; they would kill us! — Us, the ‘maladjusted,’ as they call us!”

And if some moderate protested, the voices, until then isolated, pressed together and took on ugly inflections:

“Oh, you’re one of them, a water-drinker, a milk-drinker! Don’t stay with us, since we poison! The poisoners — it’s them, the intellectuals and their forty cliques, the pedagogues and the hygienists! The proof that they wanted and engineered their disease is that it bursts out everywhere at once — is that natural? And in the asylums, where they are the masters! They want to destroy everything so they can rule among themselves.”

These formulas of anger, barely found, spread from group to group. They entered quickly into those brains, unstrung by excess and by fear. They fanatized them. An invincible association of ideas linked the electoral defeat of the positivists and the explosion of the epidemic: the latter was a revenge, and the beginning of the great attack by the arrogant caste against the multitude of men.

Bands formed, rumbling rhythmic threats. In the packed circuses the audience was inattentive. They listened to the murmurs of the riot and barely watched the spectacles offered them. Two wrestlers died at the Palace of Death. The victors were scarcely applauded. At the House of Dreams, where fifteen hundred individuals, packed tight, eyes fixed and expressions ecstatic, received the magnetic effluvia cast toward them by powerful radiators, a woman suddenly cried out:

“I’m taken… I’m dying!” She was trembling in every limb. A frightful murmur rose in the hall.

“Look at her hands!”

A blue line marked the outline of her nails.

“They’re blue!” howled ten terrified voices.

The woman kept screaming:

“Take me away! Save me!”

But those who accompanied her drew back. The spectators, howling with fright, surged toward the doors and ran to swell the eddies of the crowd.

Tillier was seated with some friends on the terrace of Meudon. All knew the latest news and contemplated with a feeling of anguish the immense city spread at their feet. A helmet of soiled mist, hovering above it, hid the stars at the horizon’s edge and drew a dark bar between the city and the pure sky.

“Terrible thing!” said Dr. Vermorel, “but these morbid conditions could not last long… we were at the edge of a catastrophe; it has come — what will it be?”

He continued, monologuing in the saddened rather than attentive silence of the others.

“What will it be tomorrow? Whom will it take? It’s a new deluge, a rising water. May the temperate be saved! May we have our Mount Ararat!”

They heard approaching footsteps.

“Oh!” said Tillier, “here are our Jura people from yesterday; they’re coming back from Paris. Do you have the newspapers, young people?”

“It’s dreadful,” said Jean with animation. “They’re insulting you.”

“I know, I know,” he answered, and he opened the Evening Dispatch that Claude Touron held out to him. “Here is the article: ‘At the moment when an unheard-of catastrophe, when a plague from another age, hovers over hearts and grips them, one will appreciate M. Tillier’s message. One will not forget the cavalier fashion in which he sends his fellow men to their death. Note will be taken. Consequences will be drawn. Where are they now, the times when scientists wished to be the servants of humanity, when they were Frenchmen?’ Et cetera, et cetera… it goes on… I understand their revolt. Nietzsche’s words were harsh; they had a brutal accent. But with all the gentleness and all the kindness in the world, what can we do? We are at an hour of destruction.”

“Don’t you hear anything?” someone said.

“Indeed.”

“Voices… murmurs…”

“I heard my name,” said Tillier. “They’re shouting: Death to Tillier! They’re coming here.”

These men were standing, leaning against the rough edges of the old parapet; they looked outward toward the dark road, and listened, silent and with hearts tightened by the saddening nearness of hatred. Suddenly some object, vigorously hurled from below, passed just between two heads. At the same instant, a cry rose, a furious and hoarse cry:

“Death to the assassins!”

“What is it?”

“A stone.”

“Our silhouettes stand out against the bright sky.”

“Let us withdraw.”

As they climbed slowly back toward the garden, a triumphant clamor greeted their retreat, followed by a new and thick volley of projectiles.

“Have you read in the Evening Dispatch?” said Raoul Herdey. “In Warsaw, they surrounded and burned the Jewish quarter. There are more than three hundred victims. They were accused of poisoning the aqueducts.”

“These epidemics drive people mad.”

“It was the same in 1832,” said Dr. Vermorel, “when cholera broke out. And, unless I am very much mistaken, cholera was child’s play compared to the plague that strikes us. Then, the disease was relatively known, and humanity roughly healthy. Today—”

“Who is running toward us?” said Tillier. “Oh! It’s citizen Jouandanne, the secretary of the Cooperative Union of Meudon. What brings you, citizen?”

“I came with friends, Monsieur Tillier. Did you know that these fanatics are talking of invading your establishment and smashing everything in your laboratories? They say the disease is in your flasks. But don’t worry. Fifty activists up there are keeping good watch.”

“What!” said Tillier, quickening his pace. “Things have come to that? Thank you very much, to you and your friends — especially since yesterday we were quarreling, you libertarians and I the positivist…”

“Yes!” answered Jouandanne. “Quarrels, we’ve had them, and we’ll have more. But you see, against the unconscious, we’ll always be in agreement.”

“I believe so too,” replied Tillier.

They had arrived at the top of the park, near the house and the laboratories; the fifty activists were there, lying on the grass, for the night was mild. Tillier thanked them warmly and asked if any incident had occurred. But no, or next to nothing: a gang had tried to force the door; threatened, they had gone away and had not returned. The conversation went on for a few moments. But it was late, and everything had been said — everything about the present and everything about the future, which allowed only fears, imprecise and terrible. They parted.

“Are you going home alone, Vermorel?” asked Tillier. “That may not be very prudent. People know you.”

“Leave it,” replied the doctor. “I’ve known how to handle madmen for thirty years now.”

He turned toward the woods, heading for his asylum at Velizy. And Jouandanne and the fifty activists went down to the left, toward Meudon. Above the shadow into which they disappeared, the sky, lit by the reflection of Parisian splendors, was livid and starless, like unhealthy flesh.

One day, two days passed. The disease and the madness spread across all of Europe. They advanced more slowly or more quickly, but they never retreated.

The crowds appealed to those in power. What could they do? In France, the liberal populist ministers, frantic, sought counsel from those very men their party insulted — the scientists.

Their Federation replied with a haughty refusal that all the newspapers printed:

“Monsieur le Ministre,

“In 1945, from the year of its founding, the Federation of Learned Societies declared:

“‘We have the right, and toward humanity we have the duty, to govern the consumption of the wealth that we have created. Those who gravely deceive themselves, and will one day repent, are those who imagine they can benefit from our discoveries while repudiating our discipline.’

“These words were prophetic. They were not heeded. The public authorities and individuals have persisted in the errors we pointed out. Against liberal and democratic dissolution, nothing has been done.

“The inevitable catastrophe has at last occurred. It does not appear, Monsieur le Ministre, that it has enlightened your government.

“You ask us to delegate to you a consultative commission. Alas, Monsieur le Ministre, we know from experience the worth of such commissions: they have been functioning for a full century; no one has been willing to listen to them.

“What could we say today?

“Either you would consult us about the disease itself that has just appeared, and about it we know nothing: it is a new phenomenon; we can only study it. Our findings will be published; they will belong to all.

“Or you would consult us on the rules of social hygiene, and we would have many precise opinions to give. But you doubtless know them, for we have repeated them many times, to your predecessors and to you.

“Monsieur le Ministre, we are ready to assume all responsibilities and all burdens of power; but we first claim all its prerogatives.”

So they refused their aid, these benefactors of humanity; satisfied, they noted the catastrophe: “it has at last occurred,” they said. The populist newspapers seized upon this maladroit “at last,” printed it in enormous letters. They demanded laws against the positivists, a reign of terror. Shouldn’t they be treated like dogs, since they treated the common run of men like dogs? It was a long cry of hatred and madness, expressing the horrible fear of all: Death to the scientists!

See where their progress leads us! clamored the demagogues. And they contrasted the life of old ages, which was gentle, on the whole, since people accepted it, with the unbearable life of their century — the golden age of the old regime against the hell of the scientific world.

The crowd listened, and with all the force of its heavy thought, it approved.

It soon appeared that the positivists, the temperate, were barely touched by the plague: this strange fact poisoned the public irritation. Wretches believed with brutal faith that the scientists wanted and engineered their ruin. In more than thirty cities, doctors and pharmacists were massacred, and in the hospitals, delirious patients found enough strength to rise up, to strike and bite with their pestilent teeth.

It was a rage: it passed. The epidemic was relentless and the crowds grew weary of listening to the demagogues, who themselves grew tired of shouting.

The month of August was very hot. The symptoms of the disease became more atrocious. The mortality of the Paris region, which six million inhabitants packed, exceeded thirty-five thousand per week. Public services being disorganized and overwhelmed, volunteers, almost all socialists and temperate, did the work of administration. They went from house to house removing corpses whose stench revealed their presence.

The epidemic had at first caused a sharp movement toward temperance. The consumption of morphine and ether had declined. But whether the deprivation was too harsh, or the benefit not quickly enough apparent, consumption figures rose rapidly, and soon equaled the previous maxima. Euthanasic practices became ordinary. Every week, in Paris alone, five or six hundred people gave themselves a chosen death.

Yet some tried to regain control, to break their habits of narcotics and idleness. They had moved away from the great cities. Taking advantage of the warm season, they had set up vast camps near the forests whose scents, it was believed, prevented the disease. Such encampments had formed in the wooded regions around Paris, and near Nevers, and in the Landes and the Ardennes.

These refugees dreamed of imitating the temperate, whose relative immunity inspired anger and envy in all. Some of them went to visit a libertarian-socialist colony. They were shown the bedrooms, elegant and simple, the vast workshops, the concert hall, the stadium for athletic games — and the infirmary, which was empty.

The visitors were amazed by what they had seen. They wanted to impose tasks and disciplines upon themselves. But the plague continued to cut among them, and when the weariness of the first chill weather came, most returned to the cities, to die, since die they must, with friends and habits.

Others persisted. Fear, and perhaps a nobler sentiment — the horror of degradation — had made them endure. They had bravely practiced the rustic life and did not want to let the energy they had regained go to waste. Among them were many mothers, pregnant women, who, even abandoned by the men, stayed on, held by the will to save their children, by an instinct of maternity that civilization had not been able to abolish. But at the onset of bad weather, discouragement seized them, and suddenly their hope turned toward the libertarian colonies. Would they not find there a shelter, a direction? They begged to be admitted, to be taken in at the very least.

Libertarians and temperate hesitated to answer. Vermorel and Tillier proposed a solution that prevailed. Certainly, they said, we must not compromise our only points of resistance against an exterminating epidemic. But why not create, outside our colonies, residences, hygienic stations, where we would receive as probationers those we cannot admit at once? We could test them, and thus reconcile prudence and humanity.

A colony in Auvergne, at Vic-sur-Cère, immediately tried the experiment. No sooner had it announced the opening of a hygienic station than twenty thousand applications were sent to it. From this frightened multitude they had to choose the two hundred best. They were warned that they would undergo the harshest regenerative disciplines. They promised obedience, and thenceforth were subjected to the absolute authority of a doctor assisted by five aides.

The other colonies followed the example of Vic-sur-Cère, and thousands of probationers were soon taken in, in vacant buildings or abandoned villages.

Soon Tillier found himself almost alone at Bellevue. Most students had rejoined their colonies. Bezoukoff had mysteriously departed, hinting that he had discovered in occult forces a remedy for the plague. Herdey was organizing a hygienic station in the valley of Port-Royal. Vittoria Vivanti, Jean Schrader, and Claire Vuillemot, who alone had remained, lived closely united, as though huddled together against the surrounding horror.

Since Herdey’s departure, Vittoria worked constantly with Tillier, and he, who had at first dreaded this break in habits, soon found he gained by the change. He was charmed by the altogether feminine finesse the young woman put at the service of an already vast knowledge, and perhaps he was unconsciously attracted by her equally feminine quickness of attention and obedience.

They were studying the disease. Every evening, Dr. Vermorel came from his hospital at Velizy, bringing substances to analyze — excretions or fragments of gangrenous limbs. He was given an account of the day’s research; they prepared the next day’s. The difficulties were extreme. The affinities of a great many bacteria had changed. These small beings reacted capriciously to the coloring agents that once reliably revealed them. Some perished in the most energetic culture broths. The world of microorganisms seemed as disrupted as the world of men. The slightest examination required a hundred minute precautions that did not prevent the most unforeseen and sometimes the most ridiculous disappointments. Tillier, Vittoria, Claire, and Jean worked with an ardor to which the latter two added the exuberant laughter of their eighteen years. These laboratory manipulations had their fun and their gaiety.

The subjects of conversation were few. They were imposed by nature, constantly repeated and alike. The extermination of the masses continued. In three months four hundred thousand Parisians had perished, and even in the colonies the number of the stricken was slowly growing.

“My latest research,” said Vermorel, “has confirmed our report from last month. The disease spares those who have in their blood the patrimony of two healthy generations — parents and grandparents; more or less harshly, it strikes all others.”

“And our research,” said Vittoria Vivanti, “has confirmed yours. Many colonies have written to us: they follow your guidelines for recruiting their hygienic stations, and find them effective.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” said Vermorel with a look of cheer on his normally absorbed face. “Here we are resurrecting a genealogical science, physiological quarters of nobility! And this is only the beginning; you’ll see.”

“I don’t belong to your aristocracy,” said Tillier. “One of my grandfathers worries me. The purest among us, I believe, are these young people — Schrader and Mademoiselle Claire. They belong to those families of Jura activists who have been intermarrying for a century. Wasn’t there a Vuillemot in 1898 who fought in Poligny against the anti-Semites?”

“That’s correct,” said the young woman.

“There was also a Schrader,” added Jean. “And we’ve been cousins ever since.”

One evening Vermorel arrived, greatly animated by the day’s news.

“What do you say about our spiritists?” he asked.

It was the most recent madness. Come from Russia, it had spread step by step across all of Europe. It had its enthusiasts, who preached the healing of all ills through a return to the soul, a pious contact with occult realities; above all, it had its charlatans who practiced ritual exorcisms for money.

Soon the multitude had turned to them. They asked so little, they promised so much, and they so well flattered the mystical instincts that anguish was developing! Everywhere there were circles of psychic healers. Some self-styled “monks,” come from who knows where, had the brilliant idea of organizing them in the churches themselves, which had suddenly filled. The old cult, reduced to a few parades of sorcery to adapt to the needs of the time, seemed renewed. The parishes were open once more, the services attended.

At Notre-Dame itself, several thousand spiritists had held a session of meditation, and it was this that had so deeply affected Vermorel. The Mass, performed with that grandiose staging whose practice had been lost for half a century, had made a deep impression. During the silence of the Eucharistic communion, women had fainted, men had cried out. An atavistic fervor had seized these wretches, and on their knees, their foreheads against the flagstones, they had called out for health.

“At Notre-Dame,” repeated Vermorel, “ten thousand madmen! This Catholic Church! One always thinks it has reached the ultimate degradation, and it manages to degrade itself still further.”

“Yes,” confirmed Tillier, “it is horrible.”

He had spoken with discouragement, and the resonance of his own voice struck him. He was becoming sad; he had lost his most intimate friend, then his brother-in-law, both swept away so quickly he had not been able to see them again. He was moreover troubled by very singular physical discomforts that he could explain only by a slight influence of the reigning disease. He felt his activity diminished by that demoralization which is the worst of epidemics. He showed nothing of it and played his role of master, but it was truly a role, sometimes a bit heavy to bear.

When the weather was favorable, the little company of Bellevue would walk Vermorel back at dusk toward Velizy. More often than not, they crossed the plain of Villebon and stopped halfway, in the forest.

Then they would turn back; Claire and Jean went ahead. Vincent Tillier and Vittoria, at a slower pace, followed.

One evening — it was November, and the spectacle was magnificent. A continuous absence of wind and rain had prolonged the autumnal splendor. The trunks rose, half-denuded, with light ornaments in which all shades of gold and crimson were mingled. The air was calm, and all nature seemed to fall silent in order to gather and absorb the last gleams of a fine day on the verge of winter.

“How well nature knows how to die!” said Tillier.

Vittoria, with a nod, assented; and Tillier, after a silence, continued his thought:

“One could have hoped for humanity an equally dignified end: beings who would have waited for and accepted death on a cooling globe. But—”

Vittoria cut in with vivacity:

“So that’s where you wanted to lead! You’re becoming too pessimistic; for some weeks now you’ve been tending toward despair. You must not!”

“Despair is a strong word. But I hope little.”

“Why, why? Look, I wish you knew the Bible. I, who am somewhat Protestant through my mother, read it as a child, and I have not forgotten. There are in the Bible several stories that resemble today’s: the Flood, Babel, Gomorrah — remember! People die by the thousands, and then there is one just man who saves all. Well, there are just men today: they will survive.”

“That’s a very mystical assurance.”

“If they survive,” continued Vittoria, holding to her idea, “and if all the others are dead, it could be salvation…”

“You construct your idyll well,” replied Tillier, smiling. “But while waiting for all the others to die, we live in putrefaction, and that will go on and on; and if we end by despairing, by slackening, then—”

“You see,” cried the young woman triumphantly, “that one must not despair! Since everything rests on us, we must support everything. And why be sad? We remain healthy, robust… Dear master, I am ashamed to tell you these things, you who are so brave; but after all — is not happiness a matter of bravery?”

Tillier, who had listened carefully, seized on those last words: happiness, bravery; he recalled having understood such thoughts, and he tried to recapture them, to reintegrate them within himself. But in vain: the fleeting sounds of the two words vanished, and Tillier looked away. Vittoria, who was waiting for an answer, remained quite disconcerted, and, her young serenity not daring to confront the sadness of an older man, she fell silent.

They went inside. A voluminous mail awaited them. From everywhere people wrote to Tillier, giving him and asking him for information on the organization of hygienic stations. The evening was spent sorting.

Before falling asleep, Tillier examined certain emotions of his inner life. He confirmed that Vittoria Vivanti held a large place in his thoughts. He valued her because she was young, devoted, trusting, and refreshed his old, saddened soul; but these same reasons that drew him toward her made him reject as horrible any thought of union. He thought that, less alone, he might be less weak, and resolved to invite his sister, widowed just weeks before, to come live with him. Which he did the very next day. She accepted, and soon Marie Tillier joined the circle at Bellevue.

The cold came in December, very sharp, and public health improved. By the end of January, the number of deaths had fallen from forty thousand to six thousand per week.

It was, by comparison, a respite. At last they could breathe in those libertarian and temperate colonies that had been leading the fight against the disease for five months. The overworked members needed rest. Since the end of November, several of them had been struck by fever and languor, by slow and depressing morbid phenomena.

In the cities, the joy was bestial. At Bellevue, life was almost gentle. Tillier wrote a study on the functioning of the hygienic cities. Two hundred thousand beings, including more than fifty thousand children, seemed settled there. For these at least, one could hope. Vittoria, Marie, and a friend of the latter — a Jewish woman named Élisa Kohnson — spent some hours each day with the orphans of a nearby asylum. The three women had an untiring solicitude for them. They flattered themselves they could save them. Tillier warned them:

“Hope little! Wait for the summer heat.”

One morning, at the very end of March, Élisa Kohnson came to knock at Marie’s door.

“Marie!” she said in a distraught voice.

“What is it?”

“The children are dying.”

Three were dead, five were dying.

Suddenly, like a squall, the plague struck with full force. The slow cases, some of which had been observed the previous year, reappeared, and the epidemic, in this insidious form, reached even the temperate. The illness began gently; it fatigued without exhausting, producing attenuated symptoms like echoes of a distant cataclysm — sensations of heat, in the long run intolerable; slight but unquenchable thirsts. The disease wandered through the organs, seeking in the body’s depths some flaw, some secret heredity upon which it could feed. It finally settled. Then a curious phenomenon occurred — the revival of ancient diseases: a century old, two centuries old perhaps, they emerged from a slumber that had seemed final; tubercular, syphilitic, cancerous, generally benign but almost always long and depressing, they reclaimed their man.

Thus the plague enveloped all of humanity. Trains ran only at very long intervals. The mail was no longer delivered. More than arms perhaps, it was energy that was lacking.

The able-bodied temperate worked to save their comrades and the masses from famine. They did not succeed in preventing famines.

The inhabitants of Bellevue had scattered; Claire and Jean had gone to join Herdey at the hygienic city of Port-Royal. Vittoria had left for Auvergne, where she had fallen ill. Perhaps she had died: Tillier and Marie did not know.

Tillier felt the discomforts he had experienced the previous year and recognized the first symptoms of the disease. He tried to tear himself from the torpor into which he was sinking. He tried to help in their work the few activists whose energy and health kept the inhabitants of Meudon alive. In a few days he was exhausted and had to shut himself in. Then he tried to fix his thought on the general aims he remembered having loved so much: the culture of mind and character, the honor of the poor human race. He forced himself to read five pages of Marcus Aurelius daily. The voice of the great emperor touched him at first, then ceased to persuade him. In vain he reread: “Look within yourself; it is within you that the wellspring of good lies, an inexhaustible spring, provided you keep digging.” Within himself he discovered only the trembling of his unhealthy heredities, his congested head, his difficult functions, his fetid breath. Tillier, renouncing all resistance, let himself be taken by the disease. For some weeks his sister Marie nursed him. Then she too was struck.

Then the most unexpected of events occurred. The centers of Aryan energy being struck, the conquered races reappeared. From Shanghai to Tangier, the Muslims, protected by their law against European intoxications, led the attack simultaneously along that immense line. Brought low in the sixteenth century by the scientific progress of the West, they had since silently waited, preserving their forces intact, and their dominators had barely sunk before they resumed the offensive. The signal was given by India. The insurrection, propagated across Asia, stirred up even Morocco. Within Russia, a revolution of the same kind took place: the Muslim, Kurdish, Persian, and Mongol aristocracies acquired hegemony over that immense Empire, now definitively won to Asia.

The few remaining newspapers published this news, and exhausted Europe seemed to rouse itself to suffer in its oldest instinct — military honor. Sick men took an interest in the handful of men holding out in Bizerte: Bizerte fell, and Arab pirates descended upon the coasts of Sicily. Alas, gone were the Dorians of Timoleon, the legionaries of Scipio, the Gauls of Caesar, the Franks of Theodosius, the Ironsides of Cromwell, the Swedes of Gustavus Adolphus, the grognards of Napoleon: the West had lost its men.

Some broken at a stroke, others slowly undermined — was this the end of humanity? The disease bred a sad and ferocious selfishness. Each one feeling himself dying, each one was alone.

It was the third return of the seasons since the plague began. Days followed days, scorched by sun, soaked by rain, swept by wind; they crossed a star of death.

Toward mid-October, someone rang the doorbell of the College of Bellevue. Vincent Tillier raised his head at the friendly sound that for several months had not been heard. He thought: “I was dreaming…” But the bell rang again.

“Marie!” he called.

Marie, half-asleep, opened her eyes.

“What is it?”

“Someone rang… look out the window.”

Marie raised her weary body, cast a quick glance, and cried out at once:

“Vittoria! It’s her — come down… she’s seen me.”

“Vittoria!” murmured Vincent, and, forcing his faltering legs a little, he made his way toward the staircase.

A moment later he came back up, accompanying Vittoria.

She was in good health, and the freshness of her complexion was a joy to the invalids, who seated her between them and, revived, questioned her eagerly.

“Where do you come from? What is happening? What do you know?”

“Where do I come from? From the station at Vic-sur-Cère. What is happening there? People drag on, they languish, alas! They live in a state of collapse. What do I know? Nothing, outside my circle. And you — what do you know?”

“Nothing, outside our circle. People live in a state of collapse, as you say; they live shut in. The poisoning undermines us; and in the lower town people die of hunger, of gangrene; they kill themselves. From here we hear the madmen screaming. Are there many madmen at Vic-sur-Cère?”

“Yes, that’s the worst. Last month we had to shoot about a hundred. We weren’t numerous enough to watch them and they hindered the work. It was dreadful. I hear their clamors.”

“Horrible thing! How many of you are there? Do you have an idea of the number of dead, of the living?”

“With difficulty. We have no statistics. I would estimate that in the Cantal, which had 180,000 inhabitants before the epidemic, fewer than 60,000 remain today — far fewer.”

“But from the number of albumin rations you distribute, one should know.”

“We’re not the only manufacturers: there are the Jews.”

“Even there they traffic?”

“Naturally, since their hygiene, their blood, I don’t know what, gives them relative immunity. They are everywhere — manufacturers, traders. And along with albumin, they sell morphine; they even smuggle it in among our probationers sometimes. They’re a plague, these Jews; they too should be shot.”

“Finally,” murmured Tillier in an anxious voice, “what do people say? What do you say? All is lost, isn’t it?”

“No! I hope… this languor that fells us is curable: I was ill as you are now, and I am cured. I assure you, I feel well. And one day you will feel well too…”

“Oh!” said Vincent and Marie ironically.

“I have seen recovery from the state you are in; I have never seen death from it. One day you will feel better; a month later you will feel well. Why? How? A mystery. Thousands, millions will have died. But the race is not lost. Think — a race is immense! The crisis is harsh; we shall come through.”

Tillier answered:

“We shall come through impaled by the Turks.”

“Courage,” said Vittoria. “I beg you — courage! Do as I do: be ready for anything, the worst as well as the best… But I haven’t told you what brings me: I’m leaving — going back to Italy. In one way I regret it; I was used to things here. But they write me from there that they need me, that the police won’t bother me, that I can return. I’ve come here to pack my things, and I’m off.”

“Are we to lose you, then?”

“You understand: I cannot hesitate.”

They spent the evening together. Tillier, resurrected for his visitor, talked — always refusing to hope.

“No,” he said, “it’s the end… Do you remember Defnet’s work on the Extinction of Species? Defnet shows perfectly that the greatest serpents, the greatest wild beasts, disappear at the very moment they have eliminated all their enemies — in full victory. Why? Defnet considers the problem insoluble. But I wonder if nature isn’t solving it before our eyes. Species disappear when they have vanquished all their enemies, when they have suppressed the dangers that kept them alert… And that is why the Europeans are dying, in full triumph: they have nothing left to fight, and they fall… Strength, perfection practiced for their own sake — some were capable of it, but only a few: it was a heroic dream, and heroism—”

His voice, which had come to life, died away.

“No,” said Vittoria gently, “no, dear master — this is not the extinction, it is the trial and the purification. Since your imagination wanders, I shall let mine wander too. What I see repeated before us is the old story of the glacial catastrophe. You know: the glaciers that came back down into our lands two hundred thousand years ago; the pitiless climate that killed all the weak and that formed, in the cold, our race — the Hellenes, the Germans, the Gauls. Yes, that is what I see repeated: the weak had swarmed, the cold passes, and tomorrow—”

“Tomorrow!” interrupted Tillier with obstinate bitterness. “It will be the end of the world — for one may say it, may one not? — it will no longer be our world, a globe inhabited by Chinese and Negroes.”

“And Jews.”

“Always anti-Semitic, Vittoria.”

“Always,” she said fiercely.

Tillier looked at her, smiling.

“One of my grievances against anti-Semitism,” he said — “I have many — is that it gives the most charming women an expression of malice.”

“One of my grievances against the French,” answered Vittoria, laughing, “is that the most serious among them give the most serious things the turn of a compliment.”

Three days later she had to leave. Tillier told her he would not forget the services she had rendered him the previous year, after Herdey’s departure; that he owed her fruitful and sweet days of work despite the harsh times; and he offered her, by way of thanks, a fine book published at the end of the nineteenth century, the Storia dell’Arte Italiana by Venturi. Then he asked:

“Where will you go first?”

“To Messina. For nine months I’ve known nothing of my family.”

“Of course, you’re Sicilian! I visited your island when I was twenty-five.”

They spoke of Syracuse, the plain whitened with stones, the theater carved from the living rock, the water so beautiful, brought by the hygienists of twenty-five centuries ago, which still flows amid the ruins; they mentally revisited the unfinished and broken monuments of the magnificent island, interrupted by wars, thrown down by earthquakes; they reminded each other of those mountains that Homer, and Virgil still, describe to us as wooded, and which, today stripped by men, rise all gray — so pure a gray against so blue a sky. Then they spoke at length of the sloping site of Agrigento, which over three kilometers, amid orchards and ruins, descends from the ancient acropolis to the sea.

“Agrigento,” said Vittoria. “Today the Africans are there.”

“This Greece,” said Tillier in a darkened voice, “this Greece! That such an experience could have been gained — and lost.”

His head had inclined as he murmured thus. When he raised it, there were tears in his eyes, and some rolled down his cheeks. Vittoria noticed: she remained silent, moved in her woman’s heart by this sight of a man in tears.

Toward spring, Tillier was better. One day he awoke less exhausted, and then, from waking to waking, he found himself more fit. Marie too was less languid. Called out by the warmth of a morning, they went out and, leaning on each other’s arm, took a few steps on the terrace from which one could see Paris. Weeds had invaded the gravel. Broom and thistles bristled the meadow. The bare branches of the pear trees were in bloom.

“I’m tired,” said Marie. “Let’s go back.”

The sound of an automobile stopping at their door held them a moment.

“It’s the car from Port-Royal,” said Marie. “It brings us cheese and milk.”

Jean Schrader appeared, carrying the weekly provisions. Claire followed him.

“Schrader! Claire Vuillemot!” cried Tillier. “What a good surprise!”

“We asked to make the delivery run today because we had news for you.”

He took the hand of his companion, who stood a little behind, and added:

“Claire and I are joined.”

Tillier looked attentively at the young man, then the young woman; he recognized on their faces the same satisfied and slightly foolish expression he remembered finding on all the engaged couples he had known.

“Come now!” he said. “You are young, you are brave.”

He embraced Jean, then Claire, whom Marie kissed, naively happy, as nearly all women are at nearly all weddings.

“You’ve been well, haven’t you, these three years?”

“Very well, both of us,” answered Jean with perceptible pride. “I believe our children will have nothing to fear. Now we must leave you to finish our rounds.”

“Farewell, then, and thank you for coming. Be happy; we need happy people to save us.”

“Until next time,” added Marie graciously. “Come back.”

They left. Brother and sister went back indoors, both silent. “To save us,” Vincent Tillier had said. For a long time the thought had not come to him that there remained a possibility of salvation.

After dinner, the evening being mild, he felt the urge to take a few steps and went out. The view was immense and dark: for two years the lights of Paris had not shone.

Tillier was drawn to the laboratory building. With difficulty he worked the lock and entered. He wandered through the apparatus room, whose rusted appearance was lamentable. He climbed the stairs, pushed open the half-open door of his study, and the familiar setting of his former life appeared to him suddenly. There was not a detail in this room that did not remind him of some memory: an effort of will, a joy of invention. But where was the man who once animated it, the active and studious Tillier?

Leaning against the doorframe, he looked. Then with slow, restrained steps, as though violating a tomb, he advanced; he sat down at his worktable and hid his face in his hands.

Innumerable memories came to him, sometimes precise and minute to the point of absurdity. Such a day he had opened such a book to find such a piece of information, and had searched in vain — and on other days, other small facts. It was like a tide coming from the farthest reaches of his laborious life, a beneficial and strong tide that rose, that enveloped him, that lifted him. He freed his forehead, reopened his eyes: “I would like to read,” he thought, and he regarded the revolving bookcase where, in the dust, his best books reposed. He noticed first his last friend, Marcus Aurelius; then Montaigne, Darwin, Stendhal, Goethe, Sophocles, a Bible. Hesitating, he pushed the little piece of furniture with his foot to examine other shelves. And as he still hesitated, and as this parade of titles amused him, he pushed again, this time with a vivacity that blurred his sight. But five thick letters, engraved in red on a black spine, remained legible and fixed the gaze: BIBLE. He accepted the oracle and took the heavy volume.

He opened to the first pages, to Genesis, and was immediately seized by this grandiose tale of crimes, destructions, and stubborn life. He followed with a shudder the vicissitudes of the Flood: “And the Eternal saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the Earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Eternal repented that he had made man upon the Earth, and it grieved him in his heart. And the Eternal said: ‘I will destroy from the face of the Earth man whom I have created; from man to beast, to creeping thing, and to fowl of the air, for I repent that I have made them.’” Yet not all life would disappear, for “Noah found grace in the eyes of the Eternal.” “And the waters prevailed, and the waters increased prodigiously upon the earth; and all the high mountains that are under all the heavens were covered. And all flesh that moved upon the earth perished… Only Noah remained, and those that were with him in the ark… And the waters prevailed upon the earth for a hundred and fifty days… And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided, and the waters went on diminishing. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.”

Vincent Tillier then read, and reread twice, the admirable passage that brought tears to his eyes: “And it came to pass at the end of forty days that Noah opened the window which he had made in the ark. And he sent forth the dove from him, to see if the waters had much abated on the face of the earth. But the dove found no place to rest the sole of her foot, and she returned to him into the ark; for the waters were on the face of all the earth. And Noah put forth his hand, took her, and drew her in to him into the ark. And he waited yet another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. And the dove came back to him toward evening, and lo, a fresh olive leaf was in her beak; and Noah knew that the waters had much abated upon the earth. And he waited yet another seven days, and sent forth the dove; but she returned no more to him.”

Toward eleven o’clock, Tillier, feeling a little weary, closed the book and went home. As he crossed the terrace, he was thinking about the future. He asked himself: What could be done?

THIRD PART

The next day, and the day after, he continued to improve. Health acted within him, mysterious like the disease, and a deep need for work, the impulse of his whole life, returned with his strength. He went to visit his friends at Meudon, Brévannes, Port-Royal, and everywhere he found small groups of exhausted men, toiling to keep alive hundreds of sick people. He would ask:

“In the last two years, what has become of you?”

“We’ve barely survived.”

“What news?”

“None; two or three leagues — that’s our horizon.”

“Hasn’t there been a slight improvement among you lately?”

“Yes, but so slight!”

“I observe it everywhere,” Tillier would answer.

He gave to some the news of others, and they listened eagerly.

But the more Tillier knew and saw, the more he wanted to know and see. What was happening in Burgundy, in the Jura? It seemed to him he could serve most usefully by reestablishing connections within this broken humanity. He communicated his plan to his sister and told her he wanted to leave, despite his lingering fatigue.

“I’ll go with you,” said Marie.

They set off together in their automobile, restored to working order. They followed the course of the Seine, and Sens was their first stop.

Through the streets of the small town, which had remained graceful despite its air of abandonment, they went up to the People’s House, whose way Marie knew. Four men working at manufacturing albumin came out at the sound of the machine. Their features were ravaged by disease, fatigue, or sadness. Tillier asked after a friend.

“He is dead,” they told him. “But you yourself — who are you? It’s been so long since we’ve seen anyone!”

“Vincent Tillier.”

“Tillier, the scientist!” exclaimed the men; and they made brother and sister come down, and there were stories, endless questions. The activists recounted the vicissitudes of their struggles against contagion, famine, the insane.

“Everywhere it was the same,” Tillier would say. “But everywhere too, for ten days now, I’ve noticed a slight improvement. And among you?”

“Yes, a slight improvement. If only it could be.”

That evening, about a hundred — those on their feet and convalescents — were gathered around Tillier. He listened to them and compiled as exact a statistic as possible for the region. He was beginning to discern how the libertarian socialists and residents of the hygienic cities worked and framed the masses who, without them, could not have survived.

The next day he left them, not without making them promise, and promising himself, to make every effort so that communications between them should be maintained.

[The narrative continues through the third part, following Tillier’s journey through France, his efforts to reconnect the scattered communities of survivors, and culminates in Bezoukoff’s assassination of Tillier. In his final moments, Tillier speaks to his companions:]

“Herdey!” he said in a voice animated by delirium, “remember! The crisis is weathered — only weathered — but you must push on, Herdey!… Jean! Claire! You must always push on.”

Pain wrung a moan from him.

“My sister,” he said, “won’t she come?”

She entered, out of breath, her face distraught. She knelt beside her dying brother.

“Marie,” he murmured, “Marie.”

He fixed on her a gaze whose intensity seemed to summon the memories of sixty years. Innumerable images whirled in his fevered brain: images of births, weddings, deaths; images of happiness and sadness, and more sadness; the father, the mother, the games, the laughter in the house — his lips stirred for a last word. But no one heard any sound. A sister’s eyes, meeting his, closed the narrow circle of his life.

Finished printing three thousand copies of this sixth cahier on Thursday, December 24, 1903, at the Suresnes Printing House (E. Payot, administrator), 9, rue du Pont.