Paris in the Twentieth Century (21 page)

Agriculture
was especially afflicted by this enormous calamity; in Provence, the vines,
chestnut trees, fig trees, mulberry trees, and olive trees perished in great
numbers, their trunks splitting vertically with a single terrible crack; even
the reeds and briars succumbed to the snow. The year's wheat and hay harvests
were utterly compromised.

It
is easy to imagine the dreadful sufferings of the poor, despite the State's relief
efforts; scientific resources were impotent in the face of such an invasion;
though Science had mastered the lightning, suppressed distances, subjugated
time and space to its will, placed the most secret powers of nature within the
reach of all, controlled floods, and mastered the atmosphere, nothing availed
against this terrible and invincible enemy, the cold.

Public
charity did somewhat more, but little enough, and poverty attained its ultimate
limits. Michel suffered cruelly; he had no fire, and fuel was priceless; his
room had no heat whatever. He soon reached the point of reducing his food to
the strict minimum and was obliged to resort to the most wretched stopgaps. For
several weeks, he lived on a preparation manufactured at the time under the name
of potato cheese, a smooth, condensed sort of paste, but even this cost eight
sous a pound.

The
poor devil then made do with acorn bread, made with the starch of such
substances dried in the open air; it was called scarcity bread. But the
season's rigor raised the price to four sous a pound, which was still too dear.
In January, in the dead of winter, Michel was reduced to eating coal bread:
Science had singularly and scrupulously analyzed bituminous coal, which seemed
to be a veritable philosophers' stone; it could become diamond, light, heat,
oil, and a thousand other elements, for their various combinations have produced
seven hundred organic substances. But it also contained in great quantities
hydrogen and carbon, those two nutritive elements of wheat, not to mention an
essence which produces the taste and fragrance of the most savory fruits. Out
of this hydrogen and this carbon, a certain Dr. Frankland had created a sort of
bread, which was sold to the needy at two centimes the pound. It must be confessed
that one had to be very fastidious to starve to death: twentieth-century
science would permit no such thing.

Michel,
therefore, did not die. But how did he live?

For
cheap as it was, coal bread nonetheless cost something, and when one has no
work, two centimes can be found only a certain number of times within a franc.
Soon Michel was down to his last coin. He stared at it a long while and began
to laugh, though his laughter had a grim ring to it. His head felt bound with
iron because of the cold, and his brain was beginning to deteriorate. "At
two centimes the pound, " he realized, "and at a pound a day, I still
have enough for almost two months' worth of coal bread ahead of me. But since
I've never given anything to my dear little Lucy, I'll buy her my first bouquet
with this last twenty sous. " And like a madman, the wretch ran out into
the street. The thermometer indicated twenty degrees below freezing.

Michel
walked through the silent streets; snow muffled the footsteps of the
infrequent pedestrians; there was no more traffic; it was dark.

"I
wonder what time it is." And the steeple clock of the Hôpital Saint-Louis
chimed six. "A clock that measures nothing but sufferings, " he
thought. He continued on his way, subject to his obsession: he dreamed of
Lucy, but sometimes the girl escaped his thoughts, in spite of himself; his
imagination failed to hold on to her; he was starving, without realizing it.
Force of habit.

The
sky glittered with incomparable purity in this intense cold; magnificent
constellations stretched as far as the eye could see. Unconsciously, Michel was
staring at the Three Kings rising on the eastern horizon in the belt of
splendid Orion.

It
was a long way from the Rue Grange-aux-Belles to the Rue des Fourneaux,
virtually the whole of ancient Paris to be crossed. Michel took the shortest
route, turned into the Rue Faubourg-du-Temple, then walked straight along the
Rue de Turbigo from the Chateau d'Eau to Les Halles. From here, in a few minutes,
he reached the Palais-Royal and entered the galleries through the magnificent
gate that opened at the end of the Rue Vivienne. The gardens were dark and
empty; a huge white blanket covered the entire space, without stain or shadow.
"It would be a pity to walk on that. " And he didn't even realize
such a surface would be mainly icy. At the end of the Galerie de Valois, he
noticed a brightly illuminated flower shop; he quickly entered and found
himself in a veritable winter garden: rare plants, green bushes, freshly
picked bouquets, nothing was lacking. Michel's appearance was not promising;
the manager of the establishment was mystified by this ill-dressed boy in his
flowerbed; they didn't belong together. Michel understood the situation.
"Nothing for it, " a sudden voice spoke up in his ears.

"What
kind of flowers can you give me for twenty sous?"

"For
twenty sous!" exclaimed the florist with supreme disdain, "and in
December!"

"Just
one flower, then, " Michel answered.

"All
right, we'll give him charity, "the florist decided. And he presented the
young man with a half- withered bunch of violets. But he took the twenty sous.

Michel
left the shop, feeling a singular impulse of ironic satisfaction, after having
spent the last of his money. "Here I am, literally without a sou." He
smiled, though his eyes remained haggard. "Fine, my Lucy will be pleased
with her pretty bouquet!" And he held to his face these fast-fading
flowers, inhaling with intoxication their absent fragrance. "She'll be
glad to have violets in the middle of winter! Onward!" He reached the
quay, crossed the Pont Royal, and made his way through the neighborhood of the
Invalides and the
École
Militaire
(it had kept the name, at least), and two hours after leaving his room in the
Rue Grange-aux-Belles, he arrived at the Rue des Fourneaux.

His
heart was pounding, and he was aware of neither cold nor fatigue. "I'm
sure she's expecting me! It's been so long since I've seen her. " Then a
thought occurred to him. "But I don't want to interrupt their dinner,
that wouldn't be right, they'd have to invite me in—what time is it now?"

"Eight
o'clock, " answered the
É
glise
Saint-Nicolas, whose steeple was sharply silhouetted against the sky.

"Oh!
by now everyone's finished dinner. " He headed for number 49 and knocked
gently at the door, hoping to surprise his friends.

The
door opened. Just as he began to dash up the stairs, the concierge stopped him.
"Where do you think you're going?"

"To
see Monsieur Richelot. "

"He's
not here. "

"What
do you mean he's not here?"

"He
no longer lives here, if you prefer. "

"Monsieur
Richelot no longer lives here?"

"No!
He's left. " "Left?"

"Evicted.
"

"Evicted!"
echoed Michel.

"He
was one of those tenants who never can pay the rent at the month's end. He was
thrown out. "

"Thrown
out!" Michel repeated, trembling in every limb.

"Thrown
out. Evicted. Dumped. "

"Where?"

"I
have no idea, " replied the State employee, who, in this neighborhood, had
not yet risen to the ninth rank.

Without
knowing how he got there, Michel found himself back in the street; his hair was
standing on end; he felt his head swaying dreadfully. "Evicted, " he
repeated, "thrown out! Then he too is cold, he too is hungry. " And
the wretched boy, realizing that all he loved might be suffering, then felt
intensely those pains of hunger and cold he had quite forgotten on his own
account. "Where can they be? How are they living? The grandfather had
nothing, he'll have been dismissed from the school—his one pupil must have
left, the cowardly wretch! If I knew him... Where are they?" he kept
repeating. "Where are they?" he asked some hurrying pedestrian, who
took him for a madman. "She must have thought I was abandoning her in her
poverty. " At this thought, he felt his knees weaken; he was about to fall
on the hard-packed snow; by a desperate effort he kept his balance. Yet he
could not walk: he ran! Extreme pain produces such anomalies. He ran without
purpose, without goal; he soon recognized the buildings of the Academic Credit
Union and recoiled in horror. "Oh, Science! Industry!" He returned
the way he had come. For an hour, he wandered among the hospices crammed into
this corner of
Paris—Les
Enfants Malades, Les Jeunes Aveugles, l'Hôpital Marie-
Thérèse
,
Les Enfants Trouv
é
s, La
Maternit
é
, l'Hôpital
du Midi, l'Hôpital de La Rochefoucauld, Cochin, Lourcine; there was no escape
from this neighborhood of suffering.

"Yet
I don't want to go in here, " he kept reminding himself, as if some force
were driving him forward. Then he found himself staring at the walls of the
Mont Parnasse cemetery. "Better here, " he decided. Like a drunken
man he prowled around this plain of the dead. Finally, he came to his senses on
the Boulevard de S
é
bastopol
on the Left Bank, passed in front of the Sorbonne, where Monsieur Flourens
[70]
was still giving his lectures with the greatest success, still ardent, still so
youthful. And then the deranged young man realized he was on the Pont
Saint-Michel; the hideous fountain, hidden under its crust of ice and quite
invisible, presented its most favorable aspect. Michel dawdled, following the
Quai des Grands Augustins as far as the Pont Neuf, and there, eyes wild, he
began staring at, or rather into the Seine. "Bad weather for
despair!" he exclaimed. "A man can't even drown himself. "
Indeed, the river had frozen over; carriages could drive across it without
danger; many booths had been set up on the ice during the day, and here and
there bonfires had been lighted.

The
splendid river dams of the Seine vanished beneath the mountains of snow; they
had been the realization of Arago's great notion in the nineteenth century;
dammed, the river would grant the city of Paris, at its lowest level, a power
of four thousand horses that cost nothing, and worked constantly. Turbines
raised 254 meters of water to the height of 50 meters; now a centimeter of
water is twenty cubic meters every twenty-four hours. Thus the inhabitants paid
one hundred and seventy times less for their water than in the past; they had a
thousand liters for three centimes, and each citizen could use up to fifty
liters a day.

Further,
the water being constantly displaced in the pipes, the streets were sprinkled
by nozzles, and each house, in case of fire, was sufficiently provided with
water at a very high pressure.

Climbing
up the river dam, Michel heard the muffled sound of the Fourneyron
[71]
and Koechlin
[72]
turbines still at work beneath the frozen crust. But here, undecided, he
turned back and found himself facing the Institute. He was then reminded that
the
Académie Française
no longer included a single man of letters; that following the example of
Laprade, who had called Sainte-Beuve a bedbug in the nineteenth century, two
other academicians subsequently took the name of that little man of genius
mentioned by Sterne in
Tristram Shandy,
Book One, Chapter
Twenty-one, page 156 of the Ledoux and Teur
é
edition; now that men of letters were becoming decidedly impolite, members
ended by taking only the names of Grands Seigneurs.

The
sight of the dreadful dome with its yellowish stripes sickened poor Michel, and
he walked past it along the Seine; over his head the sky was cluttered with
electric wires passing from one bank to the other and extending like a huge
spiderweb as far as the Prefecture of Police.

He
walked across the frozen river; the moon projected ahead of his steps his own
enormous shadow, which repeated his movements in fantastic parodies. He
followed the Quai de l'Horloge, skirting the Palais de Justice; he crossed back
on the Pont au Change, whose arches were filled with tremendous icicles; he
passed the Tribunal de Commerce, the Pont Notre-Dame, the Pont de la R
é
forme,
which was beginning to sag under its long burden, and continued walking along
the quay.